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The Supreme Court could soon change the internet forever
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoMaybe it's not a bad thing to let social media die. Everyone already knows how damaging they are. If people stop using social media, it won't matter what state laws require.
- mikewarot 3y agoAnd suddenly ...*poof* Hacker News ... disappears
- klyrs 3y ago...causing a productivity boom across the tech industry.
- mikewarot 3y ago... for about a week.... then with the disappearance of Wikipedia, YouTube, etc... people start debating canceling their internet service. ... then tech stocks crash, and the land values in California plummet to historic lows ... and a lot of former programmers find themselves doing agricultural work in the fields
- 6510 3y agoHardware demand outstrips supply as everything grinds down to a halt, buttons that use to respond in 0 seconds get multiple progress bars with accurate percentages calculated by machine learning reporting partialEventProgressStatus back to their respective motherships in real time. Then we finally crack the code and perfect eyeballs on ads and talk about nothing but tokens per conversion.
- Finnucane 3y agoThat's no excuse to allow bad laws to stand unchallenged.
- avmich 3y agoHow would you challenge bad laws if the Supreme Court doesn't care about issuing contradicting rulings?
- krunck 3y ago"If the Supreme Court sides with the 5th Circuit, thereby forcing social media sites to publish or not publish certain types of speech, in effect the government will ironically be trampling on the First Amendment rights of social media companies. " Uh, the Bill of Rights does not apply to corporations. It applies to humans. I recognize no other entities with rights.
- _blk 3y agoExactly!
- Finnucane 3y agoYou may not, but the courts have protected the First Amendments rights of 'the press' to have said 'freedom of the press', including publishers and media companies. If that weren't true, the government could freely mandate what publishers could and couldn't print.
- mpalmer 3y agoWhat if you replace the word corporation with "small business" ? do you still feel the same way? There's a significant body of case law establishing that the first amendment constrains government control of corporate speech. the Citizens United case is only the most recent high profile example and arguably the most controversial. Generally, jurists on both the liberal and conservative ends of the spectrum agree that corporate speech is protected in the same way that individual speech is.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> What if you replace the word corporation with "small business" ? Or the EFF. Or the ACLU. Or a political party.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Uh, the Bill of Rights does not apply to corporations. It applies to humans. I recognize no other entities with rights. So, you're saying that this new set of rules can be evaded by people wanting to form social media firms if they get someone to operate it as a sole proprietorship and then build a set of contractual financing, revenue-sharing, and decision-control arrangements around it that approximate (without, for the proprietor, the liability shield) a corporation, since it will then legally be a single human endowed with the rights of a human?
- climatekid 3y agoThis article is incredibly bias
- Supermancho 3y ago"both sides of the political aisle" implying there are only 2 political viewpoints. TheHill.com
- mediumsmart 3y agooh, social media, I thought it was about the internet.
- commandlinefan 3y agoIf legislation destroys social media's business models, they'll have nobody but themselves to blame for it - all you had to do was _try_ to be unbiased or even just try not to be blatantly biased, but apparently that was too hard for you to do.
- gruez 3y ago>all you had to do was _try_ to be unbiased or even just try not to be blatantly biased, but apparently that was too hard for you to do. The funny part is that both sides think they're being oppressed by social media firms. No matter what they do they'll get flak.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoThe solution to poor quality information is more speech, not censorship of what a private party deems "incorrect".
- pixl97 3y agoThe solution to a bad SnR is more noise? Not that free speech isn't its own issue, but your premise makes no sense in itself.
- mikecoles 3y agoYour analogy has failed. You assume the increase will come from noise rather than any signal that is being culled.
- pixl97 3y agoNot at all... How many posts on HN are deleted/blocked/not shown? Anytime threads even get close to controversial around here they are wiped because they tend to devolve into flame wars that create even more noise.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoNot at all. Someone says something that appears controversial, let others refute it. Controversial is often knee-jerk (or to the benefit of certain ‘stakeholders’) interpreted to be “misinformation” but that is not always the case. People should be allowed on these platforms which now de facto exist as part of The Commons, to present anything. It will stand or fall on its own merit. And there’s no need to be afraid of incorrect BS leaking into the public sphere. Its lifespan is usually very short. For example, the BS MSM and Elected Official spouted about Israel bombing a hospital only lasted about a day. And that correction ONLY happened because everyone was allowed to speak on it on X. Otherwise it’s a perfect narrative for The West and would have been perpetrated. NOTE: I am not anti-Israel but my desire for truth trumps anything favorable to anyone, whether they “are on my side” or not.
- 3y ago
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoIt seems abundantly clear that the 5th circuit is wrong. Again.
- phendrenad2 3y agoThis always goes the same way. The public demands regulation on some category of corporation. Those corporations, strangely enough, agree. "Yes, regulate us, please!" The regulation passes. Hmm, the corporations are still doing what they were doing before. Seems like they were able to find a loophole successfully. Oh and what's this? The smaller competitors are unable to use the loophole effectively, and went out of business? The CEOs of the large corporations clink champagne glasses while their stock skyrockets.
- armchairhacker 3y agoI'm sure this happens but you should give some examples. Also, many of these kinds of laws have clauses which make them only apply to social media with over a certain number of users (like 1 million or 100 million). These laws create other potential issues (mainly, government being able to control the popular narrative by "regulating" the most popular social media); but niche social medias are so niche (Twitter probably has more users than every small forum combined) that almost nobody is trying to regulate them in this way.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoWhen I was in medical instruments, the large corporation I was with was explicitly pro-regulation precisely because it made entry for others harder. Not because they thought medical instruments should be regulated for patient safety (though they should). No, as business people, they were focused on the competitive effects.
- CaptWillard 3y agoI'm out of patience with the continued clutching of pearls re: "misinformation" by the corporate press. It's to the point that I struggle to remember when the word had any relationship to truth or facts.