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Politicians cannot block social media foes: U.S. appeals court
- justboxing 8y agoExcellent. Does this means that Trump has to unblock @BitchesTheCat [1] on Twitter [2] or does it only apply to "human" accounts? EDIT: The cat is now trolling Jr to ask Sr to unblock it. https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat/status/1082343558961655808 https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat/status/1082343558961655808 [1] https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat [2] Donald Trump Has Blocked A Cat On Twitter => https://www.inquisitr.com/5036727/donald-trump-cat-twitter/ https://www.inquisitr.com/5036727/donald-trump-cat-twitter/
- buboard 8y agoDoes anyone think that trump reads the replies himself, or that the upcoming flood of trolls won't make his account even more active?
- ceejayoz 8y agoI agree that a politician's Facebook Page should be treated as a public forum... but disruptive folks are kicked out of in-person public forums on a regular basis. Seems odd that you wouldn't be able to do the same on the Internet.
- josefresco 8y agoHow would one differentiate between say an accusation of corruption (valid or not) and someone just being "disruptive"? Someone commenting "You suck lalalalalalala" is clearly disruptive but another claiming "This politician is corrupt!" may not be.
- LeftTurnSignal 8y agoJudging from how a few more meetings than I'd like went, there's no difference. If the chairmen wants you out, you're out. Does not matter what proof you bring, they still boot you out. /that is around small town USA, so hopefully won't apply to this
- dragonwriter 8y agoThis was also a small town USA case, and basically the same as you describe. The difference is the offended party challenged the action in federal court. Anything is, in effect at least, legal if you choose to accept it and not challenge it.
- salawat 8y agoU.S. Government recordkeeping. The thing that kills me is that if for official Government purposes a Facebook page qualifies as letters/documents/personal effects/etc in terms of official business, why does it not receive the same treatment for individuals in terms of 4th Amendment protections. The argument of intent to be public seems rather flimsy to dismantle a central civil right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The level of double standard is maddening. Edit: While I am harvesting downvotes, I stand by my assertion.it makes little if any sense that our Government can acknowledge the importance of our Representatives to the public record and compel an open non-discriminatory pipeline of communication, yet cannot be convinced of the right to privacy extending to electronic files and communique for non-officeholding citizens. We agree that the government, and those elected as part of it, by virtue of their power and position are to be subjected to a higher degree of scrutiny in terms of the public's right to know what they are up to and to be heard. Note: avalue assignment has been thus made. We acknowledge positive value to a Representative being able to be conferred with. Yet, the value of not-being heard I.e. not having the government able to slurp up every last bit of meta-information/information about you just because it's been handed off to some third-party, is infrequently acknowledged legally. The tests for coverage generally are concocted around pre-digital notions of privacy, and come with an assertion of non-expectancy of privacy just because the content doesn't involve an envelope/bank deposit box/safe and does involve someone else's machine. These are two aspects of the same central issue. I.e. the citizens right to be assured an opportunity to be heard when they want to, and not eavesdropped on in the conductance of their everyday lives without due process. If everyone feels that's off topic, fine. But it stands out like a sore thumb to me.
- comex 8y agoFacebook pages do receive Fourth Amendment protections, at least as things currently stand. The legal foundations for this policy are unsettled enough that it might well come under threat in the future, but... > Under its policies, Facebook requires a probable cause warrant to “compel the disclosure of the stored contents of any account, which may include messages, photos, videos, timeline posts, and location information” to the government. This is because Facebook, like other large tech companies, has adopted the Sixth Circuit’s interpretation (in United States v. Warshak) of ECPA and the Fourth Amendment as requiring a warrant to obtain emails - https://www.newsweek.com/what-mueller-looking-facebook-russia-ads-670628 https://www.newsweek.com/what-mueller-looking-facebook-russi...
- dragonwriter 8y ago> disruptive folks are kicked out of in-person public forums on a regular basis. Kicking out disruptive people isn't viewpoint discrimination, and, as you note, is already permitted in the law of public fora. This holding is simply upholding a District Court decision that existing law of public fora (including the prohibition against viewpoint discrimination) apply to the Facebook page at issue.
- sverige 8y agoSo they're public fora when someone wants to criticize a politician, but private companies with no duty to allow people to say unpopular things when the company wants to kick them off the platform. Got it. Also, does this mean all politicians ought to be obliged to have social media pages?
- tptacek 8y agoThe holding isn't about the policies of the private companies, but rather the policies of the elected officials.
- sverige 8y agoSo a politician doesn't have the right to block someone, but the private company can decide to block someone for posting comments addressed to the politician, because the private company is private but the politician has created a public forum? (Assuming arguendo the comments in question don't violate any of the private company's ToS.)
- fixermark 8y agoIANAL but that seems consistent (or maybe just the second part hasn't been tested yet).
- ep103 8y agoIf the company is pre-emptively blocking comments for the politican, then it would depend on whether or not the politican was aware of the company's action. If the company was doing it on behalf of the politican, it would still be illegal (though harder to prove). If the company was doing it as blanket policy as part of the product, or for all politicans, then yeah, that's probably a loophole.
- tropo 8y agoTrivial example: Alex Jones is blocked. Anybody who would antagonize the left is pre-emptively blocked by the platform. Since this is well-known, and it is purposely done on behalf of the politicians, following your logic it is illegal for politicians on the left to use social media. Somehow I don't see that ever getting enforced.
- gnicholas 8y ago> temporarily blocking a critic from her Facebook page, a decision that could affect President Donald Trump’s appeal from a similar ruling in New York. I would expect Trump's lawyers to point out that blocking on Twitter does not block access to information, as blocking on Facebook does. On Twitter, you can see every public tweet if you aren't logged in. On Facebook, many/most posts are not marked Public and so you have to be logged in (and sufficiently linked to the poster) to view them. Of course, there's still the issue of the inability to reply to the comment and engage with the poster on Twitter, but IMO (as a former lawyer) the bigger issue is access to information, which is less restricted via Twitter blocks than FB blocks.
- throwaway2048 8y agoIt does, if you are blocked on twitter (and logged in) you can not read a person's tweets.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- weberc2 8y agoWhich is to say, it doesn’t.
- ceejayoz 8y ago> Of course, there's still the issue of the inability to reply to the comment and engage with the poster on Twitter I wouldn't dismiss that as a small issue, given the First Amendment explicitly protects the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
- itry2develop 8y agoBut tech companies can ban and deplatform them completely for you....
- belorn 8y agoIf officials pick companies and platforms for that purpose then they would not be allowed to use those companies and platforms.
- ceejayoz 8y agoYes, until the First Amendment is modified to read "Congress and Facebook shall make no law..."
- somebodynew 8y agoIt's worth noting though that despite the clear "Congress shall make no law" introduction, the first amendment is already applied to virtually every aspect of government because beyond the restrictions on Congress it explicitly enumerates rights that belong to the people (and are then protected by the fourteenth amendment).
- dragonwriter 8y agoIt's applied to states (including subdivisions) because of incorporation of various rights, including those of the First Amendment, under the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Cause not because the First Amendment, on its own, is viewed as declaring rights enforceable against the States, much less held by individuals and enforceable against other private parties.
- nathan_long 8y agoIs the issue is whether the official reads someone's messages, or whether their critic's messages show up for others to see?
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoAlmost certainly the latter. That's why people sued over getting blocked by Trump - it prevents folks from making themselves more famous via posting sick burns in the replies to Trump tweets. I'd be surprised if Trump reads any replies to his tweets whatsoever.
- nathan_long 8y ago> it prevents folks from making themselves more famous via posting sick burns in the replies to Trump tweets That's a rather cynical take. Imagine a politician you disagree with - be they a fascist, communist, libertarian, or whatever - tweeting something blatantly false. And imagine that they block replies by everyone who contradicts them, making their replies a chorus of agreement. Wouldn't that seem to be an impediment to civil discourse?
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoYeah, it would. And it'd be a great case for a non-profit centered around issues like that. It's just honestly difficult to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars of your own money on that lawsuit without getting some kind of angle out of it.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Yeah, it would. And it'd be a great case for a non-profit centered around issues like that. Indeed. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/knight-institute-v-trump-lawsuit-challenging-president-trumps-blocking-critics-twitter https://knightcolumbia.org/content/knight-institute-v-trump-...
- tptacek 8y ago
- blancheneige 8y agoso nothing can be done about bots posting near instant and often off-topic responses to every single one of Trump's tweet? not that it bothers me the slightest, but I find it to be a concerning case of double standard given all the allegations of Russian interference on social media.
- tptacek 8y agoYou're comparing unrelated "standards". The case isn't about the health and well-being of social networks, but rather about whether the actions of government officials on those networks qualify as "state actions", which are required to comply with the Constitution, or private actions, which aren't.
- blancheneige 8y ago> You're comparing unrelated "standards". The case isn't about the health and well-being of social networks (...) That's a little too convenient. Neither cases are about "well-being" of social networks -- both are about who gets to control public discourse.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> so nothing can be done about bots posting near instant and often off-topic responses to every single one of Trump's tweet? Lots of things can be done about without violating the rule at issue here, but the thing that cannot be done about them is Trump selectively blocking them based on disagreement with the expressed ideas.
- matt4077 8y agoThis changes nothing for mechanisms trying to prevent bots, or really any other management of posts. The only requirement is that such mechanisms must be viewpoint-neutral. So you can, for example, shuffle all replies in the first minute. You just cannot penalise only those mentioning cheeseburgers, or democracy, or using all caps, etc.
- pjc50 8y agoWell, that's declared open season for abuse.
- icebraining 8y agoUsually actual abuse can be moderated. The problem is the "viewpoint discrimination". As long as abusive users of any political side get the same treatment, it's usually OK.
- mlindner 8y agoThe problem is you can game the comments. It's relatively easy to bot farm likes to keep your responses at the top of every single post. (Trump's posts had this problem extensively.) This is used to silence any other opinions whether positive or negative by burying them below the heavily automatically liked comments.
- icebraining 8y agoWell, if there's an objective way to identify such comments, then I think it can be argued that blocking them isn't viewpoint discrimination.
- riffic 8y agoGovernment organizations should be required to adopt open social media networking protocols such as ActivityPub, a W3C recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ What I envision is instead of having various elected officials and executive agencies all managing social media accounts of various centralized third-party platforms, these organizations would self-manage their own social media infrastructure (much in the same way these entities already self-manage their own DNS, web presence, and email infrastructure today.)
- ucaetano 8y ago> these organizations would self-manage their own social media infrastructure What could possibly go wrong...
- riffic 8y agoLots could go wrong, but a lot could be learned from this and it's a chance to make the internet work the way it was originally designed to work. Walled gardens are an aberration.
- asdff 8y agoWhat could that wouldn't with a private platform? A hypothetical public forum would be excellent! It would be a place where people could feel comfortable to disseminate knowledge without worrying about their information and psychological profile being bought, sold, and manipulated because it wouldn't be financially supported by those practices. If it's kept far away from Ajit Pai types, maybe bad actors could be forced out (SSN or other official verification, maybe?) Take a look at a well-run government resource like PubMed. Sure it looks awkward at first, but its extensively documented, and as you learn more and more about it you begin to appreciate how robust it is being isolated from metrics like time on platform or ad engagement. You have powerful search operators, and extensive public databases of primary literature and entire seminal textbooks. Functionality is only added, never removed. Everything we know about biology is indexed on this website and available at your fingertips (ignoring Elsevier for a moment). You don't even have to visit it unless you need to; it's trivial to set up email notifications or an RSS feed for an active search. Social media is broken. The playbook used by the Russians only worked because it benefitted from these same algorithms designed to keep peoples eyes fixed on these platforms and no other. Who would have known that designing a platform to maximize viral advertising could be used as is to maximize viral propaganda? Certainly not Zuckerberg, as he claims. The original premise of Facebook, an online extension to strictly local connections, seems so idyllic and utopian now.
- buboard 8y agoI wonder if this could be expanded to the case of private companies and the people who run them, in cases of consumer protection or consumer rights issues.
- Fnoord 8y agoIf the politician did the block silently via client-side (drop instead of reject) we would probably never have heard of this story.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoI get their argument, but what I say "X race deserves to die" and that politician should draft a law to support it? And I say it time and time and time again. Every other comment is mine, because I really believe that.