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I think Texas is at a disadvantage because they were very open about the political motivation for passing the law. But I’m wondering: suppose they pass a new l
by skissane 2y ago
I think Texas is at a disadvantage because they were very open about the political motivation for passing the law.
But I’m wondering: suppose they pass a new law permitting state residents to challenge in court “arbitrary and capricious” content moderation decisions. And to publicly justify it, they find some examples of state residents who claim to be victims of such decisions (I’m sure they could), but for posting things that aren’t obviously political. For example, we live on the other side of the planet, but I’m thinking of the time my wife was suspended from Facebook for joking that her cousin’s baby was “so cute she had to kidnap her”-her cousin read that as just a figure of speech not a violent threat against a child, Facebook disagreed.
So, a law to permit judicial review of content moderation decisions could be sold as something apolitical, and a law with such an apolitical framing might be more likely to be upheld by the Supreme Court. But once it has been accepted with that apolitical framing, then there is the potential for the judiciary to apply it in more explicitly political cases; and the precedent of applying it in apolitical cases may make courts more likely to accept it as constitutional if its application is later extended to more political cases too.
- rtkwe 2y agoThat seems like you've have to get past Section 230 still and this kind of work pushing state authority down to the individual as a kind of work around like they did with the abortion bounty laws before Roe was struck down is an insidious cancer if it's allowed to continue.