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It’s unconstitutional because the president can’t decide to change a law. Only the legislature can. Unfortunately CDA is written in a way that broadly allows t

It’s unconstitutional because the president can’t decide to change a law. Only the legislature can. Unfortunately CDA is written in a way that broadly allows tech companies to censor any content that doesn’t fit their commercial or political narratives. It’s a poison pill to Internet discourse at the endpoint we’ve reached where three or four companies control that vast majority of online speech. In a sense, the president is declaring Twitter and Facebook to be “public utilities,” an admission of defeat for the free market ideals that we pretend this country champions. Only a change to the law or reimagining of the Internet can fix this. I don’t share your pessimism that this is impossible. I think decentralized/P2P platforms do have a place and a chance to unseat tech incumbents. Remember what happened to Yahoo and AOL? I just don’t think that our current set of tech companies are immune from the same sort of abandonment and irrelevance. A moment is coming where everything changes.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> It’s unconstitutional because the president can’t decide to change a law. True, but it's within the executive branch's purview to... interpret the law a bit, as they execute it. Of course, then it's on the judicial branch to determine whether or not that was okay. > In a sense, the president is declaring Twitter and Facebook to be “public utilities,” This is actually one of the most interesting parts of this, though it definitely will be tested by the judicial branch here. Trump has decided Twitter constitutes the modern equivalent of the "public square", where people are entitled to speak freely. ...Apart from the fact that it's corporately owned, I'd totally agree that that's true: Modern free speech has moved entirely to media (TV, Internet, Radio, etc.) which are all owned by corporations. Now, where that gets interesting is that the government is required to allow you to speak freely... corporations aren't, according to current interpretations of the Constitution. The Supreme Court, however, has vastly expanded the application of the Bill of Rights before though. It's presumably possible that a future court could decide that social media companies must allow people their town square.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

> It’s unconstitutional because the president can’t decide to change a law. True, but it's within the executive branch's purview to... interpret the law a bit, as they execute it. Of course, then it's on the judicial branch to determine whether or not that was okay. > In a sense, the president is declaring Twitter and Facebook to be “public utilities,” This is actually one of the most interesting parts of this, though it definitely will be tested by the judicial branch here. Trump has decided Twitter constitutes the modern equivalent of the "public square", where people are entitled to speak freely. ...Apart from the fact that it's corporately owned, I'd totally agree that that's true: Modern free speech has moved entirely to media (TV, Internet, Radio, etc.) which are all owned by corporations. Now, where that gets interesting is that the government is required to allow you to speak freely... corporations aren't, according to current interpretations of the Constitution. The Supreme Court, however, has vastly expanded the application of the Bill of Rights before though. It's presumably possible that a future court could decide that social media companies must allow people their town square.