5 ms·

Would love to amend the constitution to not allow censorship of speech by private companies. If it's hate speech, etc. then obviously yes but otherwise censors

Would love to amend the constitution to not allow censorship of speech by private companies. If it's hate speech, etc. then obviously yes but otherwise censorship is toxic. No private companies should be deciding the public discourse and unfortunately the most common forms of communication in today's age are all routed through private entities.

ashtonkem 5y ago
This is not possible without a constitutional amendment. Also, the idea of giving politicians control over what speech must be carried on social media strikes me as stark raving mad. There is no chance that won’t be abused.
- alexfromapex 5y ago
  Yeah I think we're on the same page, no one should be able to censor speech that isn't hate speech is really the main point. And definitely no jurisdiction should be given to politicians.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    You’re proposing giving jurisdiction to politicians, you just don’t seem to be aware of it. Someone, somewhere will need to decide what speech is and is not “censorable” (a gross abuse of that word) above and beyond the regular standard of “protected speech”. Basically nobody wants to live on an internet where Twitter cannot moderate some protected speech , as that’s how you end up with 4chan. Hate speech is protected speech, pornography is protected speech, as is all kinds of harassment and bullying. Someone will need to draw the line for what can and cannot be moderated on all platforms, and that is a huge amount of power to hand out. It’s also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The courts will strike this bill down, it’s pure political theater for the base.
    - alexfromapex 5y ago
      I think 4chan is the perfect example of a site filled with lots of hate speech. There are well-established legal precedents for what hate speech is already. There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not. It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another due to Section 230 precluding state laws. If anything, Section 230 is too loosely defined right now: "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected" The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        > There are well-established legal precedents for what hate speech is already. [Citation Needed] > There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not. Creating a legal cause of action is a fantastic way to create a chilling effect without getting your hands dirty. This is a pretty common trick lawmakers use to try and backdoor introduce rules they can’t legally enforce themselves. Also, the courts consider themselves to be constrained by the first amendment. You can’t endrun around that amendment by using the judiciary, which is why Times v. Sullivan was decided the way it was, even though that was a civil action between private parties. > It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another Doing it at the federal level is not sufficient if the courts believe that the law is unconstitutional. > The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything. Again, this is not censorship. You are grossly abusing that word. The moment you face legal consequences for speech, we can talk about censorship. The word you’re looking for is “moderation”. Second, you’re tap dancing around a really big problem. It’s fine and dandy to point at 230 and say “it’s too vague”, but arguing against something is easy. You need to propose a clear alternative standard that will stand up to judicial scrutiny. You have not done that.
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    No. “Hate speech” is a vague BS term that can be applied to anything that disagrees with any established political group. I would rejoin the military to fight in a war that keeps “Hate speech” out of the US law books. The first amendment shall not be infringed on even if whatever being said is the most hateful diabolical thing imaginable. Absolutely no exceptions.
  - charwalker 5y ago
    You should read up on the tolerance paradox. The people behind this FL bill are the type to abuse such tolerance, all while telling bakeries it's chill if they refuse services for gay wedding or similar.
Caprinicus 5y ago
Hate speech does not have a definition in the US, and barely has a definition in countries where it is banned. I am sure almost everyone who has ever been banned for political reasons has had hate speech given as the official cause.
binaryblitz 5y ago
Who decides what is and isn't hate speech?
w0de0 5y ago
Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech. It is the government being allowed to control discourse even among private citizens on private property; the steps from such a law to a society in which the truth is only what the government says it is are few.
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech Nonsense. That's like saying that common carrier regulation [1] (e.g. requiring that railroads take all customers) is the same thing as the state imprisoning people without cause. It's the total opposite. The state can, must, and will apply common carrier regulations to modern communication infrastructure like internet infrastructure and social media. That's not even close to state-mandated censorship. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
  - w0de0 5y ago
    Ok. Let's talk it through. Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography. Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech. The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party! To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information. When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum. To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.
charwalker 5y ago
So, like, the same type of hate speech Trump spouted all over Twitter before his ban?

ashtonkem 5y ago

This is not possible without a constitutional amendment. Also, the idea of giving politicians control over what speech must be carried on social media strikes me as stark raving mad. There is no chance that won’t be abused.

alexfromapex 5y ago
Yeah I think we're on the same page, no one should be able to censor speech that isn't hate speech is really the main point. And definitely no jurisdiction should be given to politicians.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  You’re proposing giving jurisdiction to politicians, you just don’t seem to be aware of it. Someone, somewhere will need to decide what speech is and is not “censorable” (a gross abuse of that word) above and beyond the regular standard of “protected speech”. Basically nobody wants to live on an internet where Twitter cannot moderate some protected speech , as that’s how you end up with 4chan. Hate speech is protected speech, pornography is protected speech, as is all kinds of harassment and bullying. Someone will need to draw the line for what can and cannot be moderated on all platforms, and that is a huge amount of power to hand out. It’s also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The courts will strike this bill down, it’s pure political theater for the base.
  - alexfromapex 5y ago
    I think 4chan is the perfect example of a site filled with lots of hate speech. There are well-established legal precedents for what hate speech is already. There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not. It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another due to Section 230 precluding state laws. If anything, Section 230 is too loosely defined right now: "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected" The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      > There are well-established legal precedents for what hate speech is already. [Citation Needed] > There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not. Creating a legal cause of action is a fantastic way to create a chilling effect without getting your hands dirty. This is a pretty common trick lawmakers use to try and backdoor introduce rules they can’t legally enforce themselves. Also, the courts consider themselves to be constrained by the first amendment. You can’t endrun around that amendment by using the judiciary, which is why Times v. Sullivan was decided the way it was, even though that was a civil action between private parties. > It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another Doing it at the federal level is not sufficient if the courts believe that the law is unconstitutional. > The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything. Again, this is not censorship. You are grossly abusing that word. The moment you face legal consequences for speech, we can talk about censorship. The word you’re looking for is “moderation”. Second, you’re tap dancing around a really big problem. It’s fine and dandy to point at 230 and say “it’s too vague”, but arguing against something is easy. You need to propose a clear alternative standard that will stand up to judicial scrutiny. You have not done that.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  No. “Hate speech” is a vague BS term that can be applied to anything that disagrees with any established political group. I would rejoin the military to fight in a war that keeps “Hate speech” out of the US law books. The first amendment shall not be infringed on even if whatever being said is the most hateful diabolical thing imaginable. Absolutely no exceptions.
- charwalker 5y ago
  You should read up on the tolerance paradox. The people behind this FL bill are the type to abuse such tolerance, all while telling bakeries it's chill if they refuse services for gay wedding or similar.

Caprinicus 5y ago

Hate speech does not have a definition in the US, and barely has a definition in countries where it is banned. I am sure almost everyone who has ever been banned for political reasons has had hate speech given as the official cause.

binaryblitz 5y ago

Who decides what is and isn't hate speech?

w0de0 5y ago

Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech. It is the government being allowed to control discourse even among private citizens on private property; the steps from such a law to a society in which the truth is only what the government says it is are few.

quotemstr 5y ago
> Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech Nonsense. That's like saying that common carrier regulation [1] (e.g. requiring that railroads take all customers) is the same thing as the state imprisoning people without cause. It's the total opposite. The state can, must, and will apply common carrier regulations to modern communication infrastructure like internet infrastructure and social media. That's not even close to state-mandated censorship. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
- w0de0 5y ago
  Ok. Let's talk it through. Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography. Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech. The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party! To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information. When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum. To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.

charwalker 5y ago

So, like, the same type of hate speech Trump spouted all over Twitter before his ban?