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Copied from a comment thread below. Because I feel this is the root of the issue/problem. > I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home

Copied from a comment thread below. Because I feel this is the root of the issue/problem. > I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory. Yup. This is the exact problem that we’re (as a society/world) wrestling with. The reason it is (not just seems) different is because of the scope. A message on a chalkboard cannot reach millions of people (without the internet, ignoring [mass] media because the way it amplified things like this was far more complicated and was intentional), but it can on a website. That by itself distorts the public/private argument, but we as a society aren’t sure how or to what extent yet. These lawsuits are the second step (the first step was arguing about it in public) of figuring that out. (Going back to my side note on media, these arguments will affect media outlets directly/indirectly as well.)

dpifke 4y ago
The decision[0] gives different logic (quoting from page 85): If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the public nature of the mall to justify a speech-hosting requirement. Cf. PruneYard, 447 U.S. at 95 (White, J., concurring in part) (noting that California’s hosting requirement involved communication “about subjects having no connection with the shopping centers’ business”). But here, the Platforms are open to the public for the specific purpose of disseminating the public’s speech. It’s rather odd to say that a business has more rights to discriminate when it’s in the speech business than when it’s in some altogether non-speech business (like shopping or legal education). A point a lot of commenters here seem to be missing is that it would be perfectly legal under the law to ban all discussion of politics, regardless of viewpoint. The law just says that if you're a site with more than 50 million users, you cannot dictate which political parties your users are allowed to write favorably about and ban users for having opposing viewpoints. [0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pd... (PDF)
- Kloversight2 4y ago
  What's most interesting about this is that, as far as I can tell, no current "big tech" company violates this law.
- mikem170 4y ago
  This is an interesting precedent! The big social network companies could make the legal argument that they are advertising networks, not free speech networks, and should be able to censor people in order to better fulfil their primary purpose. They would be telling the truth.
- taeric 4y ago
  That seems like a silly distinction. At a broad level, all discussion can be seen as political. And it is natural for events to be dominated by actions from a side for a time, such that it would be natural for more criticisms of a political party over others at any time. This gets dangerously into the "whataboutisms" of toxic discourse. Especially when they are not presented in at all an even or good faith manner.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    What? No they aren’t. A discussion about my week or grocery shopping isn’t political. You can make any discussion political, but that’s not at all the same.
    - taeric 4y ago
      You'd be surprised. Folks will pick brands for political reasons, too. More, folks will band against brands for said reasons. I mean, you are correct that there can be neutral discussions. Typically, neutral isn't as neutral as you'd think.
      - TobyTheDog123 4y ago
        That would be an example of people making something political out of a non-political issue. Both people and companies can be guilty of this. "Oh, I ran into Lucy at the supermarket today" "Awesome, did they have that new brand of ice cream?" "I didn't see it, but they did have a massive sale on strawberries." "Darn, I guess I'll check Market Cart next time I go." --- "Oh, I ran into Lucy at the supermarket today" "Did you hear she voted for Tom?" "Oh... uh, no?" "I dont know how people can enable such evil. Did they have that new ice cream?" "No, but they did have a massive sale on strawberries" "Oh, I heard they donated to Tom, so I don't want it in my house anyways."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
If people want there to be a public square online, lobby the government to build and maintain it. Call it "US GOV Civic Not-Facebook public square". Let your taxes pay for it and enjoy all the awesome freedom it'll bring. Otherwise, stop trying to dictate how a private company runs their own business. You already pay for literal, physical town squares, why not a digital one?
- dpifke 4y ago
  No need for a government-sponsored forum, when smaller forums are explicitly exempted from the Texas law. The law at issue still allows forums with 49,999,999 or fewer users to discriminate based on political viewpoint. It only says sites larger than that need to allow all political viewpoints (but only if they allow any political viewpoints, and only if they have users in Texas). Legal: Message board with 49 million users that says "no Republicans allowed." Legal: Message board with 51 million users that says "no politics allowed." Legal: Message board with 51 million users (none in Texas) that says "no Libertarians allowed." Not legal: Message board with 51 million users (some in Texas) that says "no Democrats allowed."
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Why the cutoff? Is it because all the companies it would apply to agents conservative, like Truth Social?
    - cdash 4y ago
      Because there needs to be a cutoff in determining when it becomes a "public" square.
      - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        I just googled it and found that "With so many “small towns,” the average local jurisdiction population in the United States is 6,200." why not use that as the limit?
NeverFade 4y ago
> I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory. If it's a website with over 50 million users, and it's designed explicitly as a place for these users to express themselves, then calling it "a public square" seems entirely warranted.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- themitigating 4y ago
  Why?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - NeverFade 4y ago
    If you're not protecting free speech in the places where free speech actually happens, then you are not protecting free speech at all. If speech has shifted online, to massive social media websites like Twitter, and you don't protect it there, then you have no free speech in your country.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      There's no protection for free speech in the US only that the government can't make laws restricting it
      - NeverFade 4y ago
        Freedom of Expression is a core value in the US: > Freedom of speech, of the press, of association, of assembly and petition -- this set of guarantees, protected by the First Amendment, comprises what we refer to as freedom of expression. The Supreme Court has written that this freedom is "the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom." Without it, other fundamental rights, like the right to vote, would wither and die. https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression As expression increasingly moves online, we will have to find ways to protect it online. A future in which the vast majority of speech happens in private online platforms, that may curtail it at will, is not just dystopian but goes against core American values, and the essence of freedom.
anotherOneSound 4y ago
i don’t think the crux of the issue is determining how to legislate the priv/publ dichotomy, but rather how can we enable as many people as desire an ability to establish their own chalkboard. legislation as its proceeding is serving to entrench big tech platforms, its disabling the common person from having their own chalkboard with its own moderation preferences. let the market decide. this, in my opinion, is not the place for law. you don’t like how twitter does things? use a different app. it doesn’t exist? build it. this includes things like legislation determining how to “appropriately” handle user data. it would be very easy to make it too expensive for any one person to “appropriately” handle user data in their webapp, which is my concern with the current twitter drama
- solarmist 4y ago
  That may be a better ideal solution, but that’s not the world we live in. I have no interest in establishing my own chalk board, nor do most people.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Your lack of motivation is on you
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    This would be very easy for ISPs to set up on their leased routers. In fact until recently most people would have their email come from their ISP ! Some would also have a personal website space - mine is somehow still up 20 years later ! (At the time, routers wouldn't be common, especially not full-blown Linux computers, so it was all on ISP's servers.) The only tricky part (which is perhaps even worse already with the "cloud"), is that some legislation is needed to simplify transfers (and not just the file ones) from one ISP to another, like we already have with phone numbers.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Make your own website if you want a chalkboard
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> reach millions of people I think this is the heart of the problem. These social media companies didn't merely build agoras, they built amphitheaters. They build amphitheaters so large that control over the amphitheater makes you a kingmaker. Now they can't let go of that control, because doing so would risk the wrong people using it. They never should have built amphitheaters this large in the first place. Better if they had built thousands of smaller amphitheaters, or none at all. Stop giving anybody bullhorns that can reach millions of people. Let ideas reach millions of people the natural way. One person tells a few hundred people their ideas, using the un-amplified power of their own voice. If what they say has any sense, each of those hundreds can tell hundreds more, and each of those can tell hundreds more again. That's how one person can reach millions, without the existence of massive kingmaker amphitheaters.
- Thorentis 4y ago
  The logical solution to this problem then, seems to be breaking up the amphitheatres. If these places are too big that we are forced to treat them as public squares, then we should pass laws that do not allow amphitheatres that large to exist.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    That actually seems like a pretty reasonable solution. It would solve all the issues with private people/companies having too much sway. And the disconnect people have trying to reason about someone with that kind of world altering influence. It would be like monopoly laws but for amphitheaters. I think we’d need to be much more aggressive with the definitions though and having fewer than 10s would trigger these laws.
thrown_22 4y ago
MySite.com will crash if a million people try to read it. BigCorp.com will not. If you can serve more than two dozen people you're not a home, pub or private property, you are by definition a public square.
- philjohn 4y ago
  So a theatre can't evict someone for ruining the performance for everyone? A concert venue can't evict someone for smuggling in alcohol?
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    what theatre can hold a million people?
    - philjohn 4y ago
      You said more than two dozen and it becomes a defacto public square.
hackerlight 4y ago
We should stop trying to find comparisons or analogies to other situations. Social media is its own totally unique phenomenon. We need to analyze it from first principles. If we try to draw comparisons to print media, cafes, or whatever, we are just going to confuse ourselves.
rocqua 4y ago
I thought that censoring speech in privately owned public spaces was fine. It's only when a government censors speech that the first amendment kicks in. I do, as it happens, believe it is a problem that Twitter censors so much speech without 'legitimacy'. Not because they censor the wrong things, but because their censorship without legitimacy fuels a persecution complex. This is mostly a problem because Twitter is so big. And I don't think starting alternative Twitters (like truth social) is a good solution, mostly because it partitions the conversation even more.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
When you can cram 50 million people into your local cafe, come talk to me. This law is limited to platforms with > 50 million MONTHLY active users. People talk about 2nd order effects all the time, here's the really interesting part. These companies will suddenly be incentivized to clearly identify bots as not-real-people due to this law. Imagine how much power this will take away from those with the platform to scale bots. You can disagree with the specifics, but the spirit is in the right place.

dpifke 4y ago

The decision[0] gives different logic (quoting from page 85): If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the public nature of the mall to justify a speech-hosting requirement. Cf. PruneYard, 447 U.S. at 95 (White, J., concurring in part) (noting that California’s hosting requirement involved communication “about subjects having no connection with the shopping centers’ business”). But here, the Platforms are open to the public for the specific purpose of disseminating the public’s speech. It’s rather odd to say that a business has more rights to discriminate when it’s in the speech business than when it’s in some altogether non-speech business (like shopping or legal education). A point a lot of commenters here seem to be missing is that it would be perfectly legal under the law to ban all discussion of politics, regardless of viewpoint. The law just says that if you're a site with more than 50 million users, you cannot dictate which political parties your users are allowed to write favorably about and ban users for having opposing viewpoints. [0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pd... (PDF)

Kloversight2 4y ago
What's most interesting about this is that, as far as I can tell, no current "big tech" company violates this law.
mikem170 4y ago
This is an interesting precedent! The big social network companies could make the legal argument that they are advertising networks, not free speech networks, and should be able to censor people in order to better fulfil their primary purpose. They would be telling the truth.
taeric 4y ago
That seems like a silly distinction. At a broad level, all discussion can be seen as political. And it is natural for events to be dominated by actions from a side for a time, such that it would be natural for more criticisms of a political party over others at any time. This gets dangerously into the "whataboutisms" of toxic discourse. Especially when they are not presented in at all an even or good faith manner.
- solarmist 4y ago
  What? No they aren’t. A discussion about my week or grocery shopping isn’t political. You can make any discussion political, but that’s not at all the same.
  - taeric 4y ago
    You'd be surprised. Folks will pick brands for political reasons, too. More, folks will band against brands for said reasons. I mean, you are correct that there can be neutral discussions. Typically, neutral isn't as neutral as you'd think.
    - TobyTheDog123 4y ago
      That would be an example of people making something political out of a non-political issue. Both people and companies can be guilty of this. "Oh, I ran into Lucy at the supermarket today" "Awesome, did they have that new brand of ice cream?" "I didn't see it, but they did have a massive sale on strawberries." "Darn, I guess I'll check Market Cart next time I go." --- "Oh, I ran into Lucy at the supermarket today" "Did you hear she voted for Tom?" "Oh... uh, no?" "I dont know how people can enable such evil. Did they have that new ice cream?" "No, but they did have a massive sale on strawberries" "Oh, I heard they donated to Tom, so I don't want it in my house anyways."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

If people want there to be a public square online, lobby the government to build and maintain it. Call it "US GOV Civic Not-Facebook public square". Let your taxes pay for it and enjoy all the awesome freedom it'll bring. Otherwise, stop trying to dictate how a private company runs their own business. You already pay for literal, physical town squares, why not a digital one?

dpifke 4y ago
No need for a government-sponsored forum, when smaller forums are explicitly exempted from the Texas law. The law at issue still allows forums with 49,999,999 or fewer users to discriminate based on political viewpoint. It only says sites larger than that need to allow all political viewpoints (but only if they allow any political viewpoints, and only if they have users in Texas). Legal: Message board with 49 million users that says "no Republicans allowed." Legal: Message board with 51 million users that says "no politics allowed." Legal: Message board with 51 million users (none in Texas) that says "no Libertarians allowed." Not legal: Message board with 51 million users (some in Texas) that says "no Democrats allowed."
- themitigating 4y ago
  Why the cutoff? Is it because all the companies it would apply to agents conservative, like Truth Social?
  - cdash 4y ago
    Because there needs to be a cutoff in determining when it becomes a "public" square.
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      I just googled it and found that "With so many “small towns,” the average local jurisdiction population in the United States is 6,200." why not use that as the limit?

NeverFade 4y ago

> I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory. If it's a website with over 50 million users, and it's designed explicitly as a place for these users to express themselves, then calling it "a public square" seems entirely warranted.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
themitigating 4y ago
Why?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NeverFade 4y ago
  If you're not protecting free speech in the places where free speech actually happens, then you are not protecting free speech at all. If speech has shifted online, to massive social media websites like Twitter, and you don't protect it there, then you have no free speech in your country.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    There's no protection for free speech in the US only that the government can't make laws restricting it
    - NeverFade 4y ago
      Freedom of Expression is a core value in the US: > Freedom of speech, of the press, of association, of assembly and petition -- this set of guarantees, protected by the First Amendment, comprises what we refer to as freedom of expression. The Supreme Court has written that this freedom is "the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom." Without it, other fundamental rights, like the right to vote, would wither and die. https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression As expression increasingly moves online, we will have to find ways to protect it online. A future in which the vast majority of speech happens in private online platforms, that may curtail it at will, is not just dystopian but goes against core American values, and the essence of freedom.

anotherOneSound 4y ago

i don’t think the crux of the issue is determining how to legislate the priv/publ dichotomy, but rather how can we enable as many people as desire an ability to establish their own chalkboard. legislation as its proceeding is serving to entrench big tech platforms, its disabling the common person from having their own chalkboard with its own moderation preferences. let the market decide. this, in my opinion, is not the place for law. you don’t like how twitter does things? use a different app. it doesn’t exist? build it. this includes things like legislation determining how to “appropriately” handle user data. it would be very easy to make it too expensive for any one person to “appropriately” handle user data in their webapp, which is my concern with the current twitter drama

solarmist 4y ago
That may be a better ideal solution, but that’s not the world we live in. I have no interest in establishing my own chalk board, nor do most people.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Your lack of motivation is on you
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  This would be very easy for ISPs to set up on their leased routers. In fact until recently most people would have their email come from their ISP ! Some would also have a personal website space - mine is somehow still up 20 years later ! (At the time, routers wouldn't be common, especially not full-blown Linux computers, so it was all on ISP's servers.) The only tricky part (which is perhaps even worse already with the "cloud"), is that some legislation is needed to simplify transfers (and not just the file ones) from one ISP to another, like we already have with phone numbers.
themitigating 4y ago
Make your own website if you want a chalkboard

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> reach millions of people I think this is the heart of the problem. These social media companies didn't merely build agoras, they built amphitheaters. They build amphitheaters so large that control over the amphitheater makes you a kingmaker. Now they can't let go of that control, because doing so would risk the wrong people using it. They never should have built amphitheaters this large in the first place. Better if they had built thousands of smaller amphitheaters, or none at all. Stop giving anybody bullhorns that can reach millions of people. Let ideas reach millions of people the natural way. One person tells a few hundred people their ideas, using the un-amplified power of their own voice. If what they say has any sense, each of those hundreds can tell hundreds more, and each of those can tell hundreds more again. That's how one person can reach millions, without the existence of massive kingmaker amphitheaters.

Thorentis 4y ago
The logical solution to this problem then, seems to be breaking up the amphitheatres. If these places are too big that we are forced to treat them as public squares, then we should pass laws that do not allow amphitheatres that large to exist.
- solarmist 4y ago
  That actually seems like a pretty reasonable solution. It would solve all the issues with private people/companies having too much sway. And the disconnect people have trying to reason about someone with that kind of world altering influence. It would be like monopoly laws but for amphitheaters. I think we’d need to be much more aggressive with the definitions though and having fewer than 10s would trigger these laws.

thrown_22 4y ago

MySite.com will crash if a million people try to read it. BigCorp.com will not. If you can serve more than two dozen people you're not a home, pub or private property, you are by definition a public square.

philjohn 4y ago
So a theatre can't evict someone for ruining the performance for everyone? A concert venue can't evict someone for smuggling in alcohol?
- thrown_22 4y ago
  what theatre can hold a million people?
  - philjohn 4y ago
    You said more than two dozen and it becomes a defacto public square.

hackerlight 4y ago

We should stop trying to find comparisons or analogies to other situations. Social media is its own totally unique phenomenon. We need to analyze it from first principles. If we try to draw comparisons to print media, cafes, or whatever, we are just going to confuse ourselves.

rocqua 4y ago

I thought that censoring speech in privately owned public spaces was fine. It's only when a government censors speech that the first amendment kicks in. I do, as it happens, believe it is a problem that Twitter censors so much speech without 'legitimacy'. Not because they censor the wrong things, but because their censorship without legitimacy fuels a persecution complex. This is mostly a problem because Twitter is so big. And I don't think starting alternative Twitters (like truth social) is a good solution, mostly because it partitions the conversation even more.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

When you can cram 50 million people into your local cafe, come talk to me. This law is limited to platforms with > 50 million MONTHLY active users. People talk about 2nd order effects all the time, here's the really interesting part. These companies will suddenly be incentivized to clearly identify bots as not-real-people due to this law. Imagine how much power this will take away from those with the platform to scale bots. You can disagree with the specifics, but the spirit is in the right place.