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Honest question (I'm not making the connection on my own, so please help me out): how does giving me the ability to instruct a social network to delete my infor

Honest question (I'm not making the connection on my own, so please help me out): how does giving me the ability to instruct a social network to delete my information (and a law to enforce that instruction) infringe on the network's first amendment rights?

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> how does giving me the ability to instruct a social network to delete my information (and a law to enforce that instruction) infringe on the network's first amendment rights? There is a difference between the right to deletion and the right to be forgotten. Right to deletion is "I gave you these data, these data are mine, please delete them." Right to be forgotten means "you have these data, they concern me, please delete them". Say you tweet something. That tweet, under current law, is Twitter's. Let's say a right to deletion is enacted. Now, you can require Twitter to delete the tweet from its records. This is great! Now say that while the tweet was up, a newspaper quoted it. Now, when someone searches your name, that article comes up. A right to be forgotten means you can require search engines de-list that article from your search results. Rights to deletion don't necessarily interfere with the First Amendment because they concern your first-party data. Rights to be forgotten, by dealing with third-party data, often public, published data, are more problematic.
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  Apologies for the conflation of 'deletion instruction' and 'right to be forgotten' - thanks for pointing that out. I'm under the impression, in the USA, that I wrote the tweet, therefore I'm the copyright holder, and I've only licensed it to Twitter. Further, I'm under the impression that the smart publisher is going to reach out to me to republish my tweet (under license.) If I'm mistaken, please correct me. Given that I created the content and I hold the copyright, I can revoke the license I gave to Twitter. However, Twitter's TOS probably requires a 'non-revocable license' and a law requiring services to offer deletion would presumably remove the ability of these companies to insist on a non-revocable license. Personally, I'd be on the side of 'allow deletion' rather than 'right to be forgotten' but I also feel like cementing the concepts of content ownership ("no, $service, you don't own user-generated content") and licensing ("no $service, you cannot insist on a non-revocable license") would go a long want to enabling either deletion, or rights to be forgotten.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  > Rights to deletion don't necessarily interfere with the First Amendment because they concern your first-party data The first amendment does not talk about copyright or distinguish first with third-party data.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > The first amendment does not talk about copyright or distinguish first with third-party data The Constitution talks about copyright and a series of court cases have circumscribed commercial speech within the First Amendment's projections, e.g. you can't commit fraud and call it free speech.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> how does giving me the ability to instruct a social network to delete my information (and a law to enforce that instruction) infringe on the network's first amendment rights? There is a difference between the right to deletion and the right to be forgotten. Right to deletion is "I gave you these data, these data are mine, please delete them." Right to be forgotten means "you have these data, they concern me, please delete them". Say you tweet something. That tweet, under current law, is Twitter's. Let's say a right to deletion is enacted. Now, you can require Twitter to delete the tweet from its records. This is great! Now say that while the tweet was up, a newspaper quoted it. Now, when someone searches your name, that article comes up. A right to be forgotten means you can require search engines de-list that article from your search results. Rights to deletion don't necessarily interfere with the First Amendment because they concern your first-party data. Rights to be forgotten, by dealing with third-party data, often public, published data, are more problematic.

jagged-chisel 7y ago
Apologies for the conflation of 'deletion instruction' and 'right to be forgotten' - thanks for pointing that out. I'm under the impression, in the USA, that I wrote the tweet, therefore I'm the copyright holder, and I've only licensed it to Twitter. Further, I'm under the impression that the smart publisher is going to reach out to me to republish my tweet (under license.) If I'm mistaken, please correct me. Given that I created the content and I hold the copyright, I can revoke the license I gave to Twitter. However, Twitter's TOS probably requires a 'non-revocable license' and a law requiring services to offer deletion would presumably remove the ability of these companies to insist on a non-revocable license. Personally, I'd be on the side of 'allow deletion' rather than 'right to be forgotten' but I also feel like cementing the concepts of content ownership ("no, $service, you don't own user-generated content") and licensing ("no $service, you cannot insist on a non-revocable license") would go a long want to enabling either deletion, or rights to be forgotten.
dependenttypes 7y ago
> Rights to deletion don't necessarily interfere with the First Amendment because they concern your first-party data The first amendment does not talk about copyright or distinguish first with third-party data.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > The first amendment does not talk about copyright or distinguish first with third-party data The Constitution talks about copyright and a series of court cases have circumscribed commercial speech within the First Amendment's projections, e.g. you can't commit fraud and call it free speech.