There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc.
A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
Freedom of speech is literally the first thing in the Bill of Rights. The government did a bad thing. Why defend them?
This is not how a preliminary injunction works.
The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court.
The standard for such an injunction is not proof, but "they might prevail in court, and there's potentially enough harm from letting it continue in the meantime".
Judge Doughty could have dismissed the case without an opportunity for discovery, as another judge did in another NCLA case, Changizi v. HHS, involving the same sort of censorship. Judge Doughty understood, however, that a largely secret censorship system can’t be evaluated under the First Amendment until after discovery.
The Opinion Pages of the WSJ also tend to lean more conservative, while the news side leans liberal. Though they will happily publish people from the left, such as publishing President Biden: https://www.wsj.com/articles/never-bet-against-the-american-...
To wit, it matters not if the Giant makes a polite or directly threatening request of Jack. In either case, Jack is right to assume that he has no choice in the matter. And can not be expected to tell the Giant to "pound sand". Conversely, the Giant should not be able to claim that Jack had a choice.
The government has no business asking any entity, which it does not fund, to remove speech in the United States.
Whether that suppression was done with threats, requests, subtle hints, or an automated system, if the government's intent was to suppress speech, the means employed make no difference.
Edit: imagine an extreme case in which a social network independently created an automated system for government employees to remove posts. Would it be constitutional for the government to use that system?
Clearly not, despite the lack of any coercion.
"The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country." [1] (emphasis mine)
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
They literally did not.
This is a preliminary injunction, not a decision on the merits.
This is why the court is clear they are allegations, etc.
There is a ton of issues with this injunction and rationale, and it will almost certainly be overturned (or at the very least,seriously modified) on appeal.
In fact, the injunction and reasoning even deliberately misquotes evidence to try to support points. Not like in arguable ways, either. While that sort of thing may be fun and play okay sometimes at the district level, and in the news, 99% of the time that goes very badly at appeals.
I strongly doubt when that happens that you will come back and say "i guess the government didn't do a bad thing"
(I read the entire decision, FWIW)
"Plaintiffs have shown that not only have the Defendants shown willingness to coerce and/or to give significant encouragement to social-media platforms to suppress free speech with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and national elections, they have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues, such as gas prices, parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender, and abortion"
Doesn't sound to me like the court is clear they are allegations.
As fare as predictions go do you think the gov will come out clean or it'll end with "gov did a bad thing"? And if so will _you_ come back and say "i guess the government did do a bad thing"?
Honestly - it's hard to say. I think it will be that some people in the government asked for things they shouldn't have (let's ignore if they are illegal things or not or whatever for a second). The government is big. My experience with any large company discovery is that somebody somewhere says or does something stupid. It's hard to believe that won't be the case for the government here[1] :)
I think some people take the view that's okay (despite imbalance of power), and others think they should only be allowed to ask for things that are affirmatively okay.
Historically, the court result has been the former, though usually it's closer to "state/feds pass law saying x, ask you to do x, law gets overturned as not okay".
I think it may be decided to be closer to the middle now if it makes it to SCOTUS - but i'm not sure what that looks like. It's hard to come up with bright line standards, but bad facts make bad law - if the there are senior officials ordering censorship, ....
I don't think folks will go all the way to saying the government may not ask for things that later may be decided to be illegal to ask for.
[1] I would personally be much more concerned if it was senior officials vs random worker bees. Unlike some corporations, the government is actually pretty darn good at retaining evidence,etc. So if senior officials ordered it, the likelihood of a record existing is much much higher than "CEO who verbally tells a junior software engineer to do something bad" or whatever.
Because a depressingly large percentage of people would actually like to see the first amendment overturned.
Only one side is afraid of open debate and pure freedom of speech. Why could that be?
I think framing this as being about speech with which one disagrees, or finds repugnant, is a bit disingenuous. It omits consideration of the possibility of speech that is genuinely harmful. For a few examples:
- My friends and I decide it'd be cool to put you in jail, so we report you as committing a serious crime that you didn't, and all give matching testimony that leads to your conviction.
- Pfizer starts selling a new drug that cures cancer. Except it turns out that they completely fabricated all the studies showing its effect, and actually the pills are nothing but placebos.
- A mugger with his hand in his pocket stops you at night and says, "Give me your wallet or I'll shoot you." You give him your wallet and he leaves.
I hope you would agree that these situations are... not ideal, and that the law should be able to discourage them. Despite the fact that all of these are, indisputably, speech.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
The legal theory at stake here is that all government speech is inherently coercive. But this is not necessarily true, or aligned with free speech as a principle of society.
Any time someone says “we must protect free speech by legally enjoining the following people from speaking,” I am suspicious.
If the speech the government officials are engaging in is a demand to censor the political speech of citizens, then we are looking at a violation of the First Amendment.
Nobody is saying that government officials can't engage in other kinds of speech that don't violate the Bill of Rights.
"Censor" is doing a lot of work here.
It's important for the government to engage in public speech that may lead another person to self-censor. E.g., a press release saying "FYI: publishing your how-to-build-a-nuke guide is gonna help crazy people bomb US cities, please don't do that."
If gov speech is inherently coercive, then the gov is NOT allowed to make that request. (which feels dumb to me) In reality, it's more likely a court would hold they can say that; they just can't imprison the publisher (or audit their taxes more aggressively) as a result.
So the gov can def say things that would lead to self-censorship. They just can't be dicks about it.
You are trying to assign Constitutional Rights to the government in its relationship with citizens. As if the government was an individual whose rights are covered under the First Amendment and it is the citizens who are restricted from limiting the government's freedoms.
Very specifically, the First Amendment protects Freedom of Speech of US citizens by restricting what the government can do. Under the First Amendment and its case law, the government is widely restricted from censoring citizens.
Your sole rhetorical strategy was to invert that relationship in a manner that does not exist.
Beyond that, it has long been established in case law that government requests for censorship are tantamount to demands that have the threat of force behind them.
Government speech isn't inherently coercive, but government speech telling one party to muzzle another, or else, is coercive.
They are. They're not allowed to speak on _behalf_ of the government without limit, though. In this case, it's pretty clear, that's what they did.
They weren't _personally_ reaching out to Twitter as a citizen and asking for posts to be removed. They were asking as _agents_ of the government, through official communications channels established precisely for this purpose, and they did it on taxpayer paid time.
> Any time someone says “we must protect free speech by legally enjoining the following people from speaking,” I am suspicious.
The purpose of their speech is to remove the ability for others to access platforms. They are not making any legal claims or starting any legal cases, they are simply using their power to remove speech from American citizens. They have no _natural right_ to do this.
Not necessarily talking about this injunction in particular, but I would like to address this argument. Yes, freedom of speech is very clearly expressed in the Constitution. But there are limits and exceptions to every right in the Constitution, certainly including speech.
There are many things that are indisputably "speech" and yet are also illegal: fraud, extortion, libel, slander, perjury, threats, impersonating a doctor or law enforcement officer, etc.
I think it would be difficult to make a case that our society would be better off if we defined free speech in so broad and absolutist a sense as to permit all of these. So our evaluation of any particular issue must be more complex than "it's speech, therefore it is always automatically okay."
Talk about smuggling your conclusion into the premise.
Even before centralizing websites entered pop culture, it was blatantly obvious that they are intrinsically subject to censorship, just like TV, radio, and newspapers. cf "The revolution will not be televised". It wasn't a matter of if, and it wasn't even a matter of when. They are defective by design, and most people just straight up didn't seem to care. Just like how they were happy to believe corporate news on other mediums for decades.
Furthermore, most of the power in this country resides outside the de facto government. The pattern of "this is bad for us. please take it down. <possible implied escalation>" is routine and banal. Focusing on a government agency doing this (which actually has much less soft power than say a major advertiser or a golf buddy), and blowing it out of proportion just feels like a distraction from the overall dynamic. "Look we found the censorship! This is what we need to fix!" - even though censorship is pervasive for any centralized media.
Did you read the article?
>The ruling was criticized by Jameel Jaffer, an adjunct professor of law and journalism who is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "It can't be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies," Jaffer told The New York Times, calling it "a pretty radical proposition that isn't supported by the case law."
> While the government must be careful to avoid coercion in its efforts to combat false information, Jaffer said that "unfortunately, Judge Doughty's order doesn't reflect a serious effort to reconcile the competing principles."
> Stanford Law School Assistant Professor Evelyn Douek told The Washington Post that the "injunction is strikingly broad and clearly intended to chill any kind of contact between government actors and social media platforms."
> A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately."
are just self-dealing. If I email Twitter with a request like that, they correctly route it to /dev/null. If the office of the President sends that, they can't do that. It's just too risky. So that's why I think it's an abuse of power.
In the absence of some court ruling that prohibits parody, you have the Constitutional right to pretend to be Hunter Biden's daughter on Twitter. Twitter also has the right to do some editorializing, like not giving them a checkmark, or posting a note like "we don't think this is actually Hunter Biden's daughter", or shutting down the account. It's their right, but they have to do it because they want to do it, not because the President of the United States said so. That's not a power that the President has.
While I personally agree with the causes the administration is fighting for, they are exercising powers that the government doesn't have. That should always be viewed critically. It sucks that people are getting bad information about vaccines. Increase funding for schools or get a Constitutional amendment passed that removes the freedom of speech. Threatening emails are easy, but an abuse of power. Follow the process you swore an oath to uphold, even if you don't get instant gratification. The 1st Amendment exists for a good reason, and we can't forget that.
I'm not sure you read the article you're quoting, because you're claiming stuff that does not correspond to the facts.
The article you're quoting states quite clearly that a judge granted a request for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on how a few state institutions can exercise their rights to fight disinformation.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
This is a preliminary injunction. It loosely means "hey we have here a plaintiff that claims a few government institutions are doing something wrong. While we check if the plaintiff's complain holds any water, let's put a pin on these things."
The article you're quoting also states quite clearly that the US government has the right to fight disinformation, specially that which directly harms the public. This happens to be exactly the case.
This boils down to covid denialists and antivaxers in general trying to push their disinformation, and thus trying to stop state institutions such as the Department of Health from suggesting that, say, letting a pandemic spread freely through a population can get a lot of people killed.
The filing is that there is sufficient probability the government did a bad thing to issue an injunction while the court figures out if the government did a bad thing. In general, injunctions protecting freedom of speech are broadly and freely issued.
... But a rational person can ask how we protect free speech by muzzling the government in this context.
Prohibiting unlawful orders is not an abridgment of an authority’s “free speech”.
It’s just these few non first amendment protected items that the court is ideologically opposed to that the government cannot suppress.
This is a famously narrow category (eg CSAM). The gov often can't even suppress state secrets. I think most people are fine with this category existing, even if there's disagreements on what's in it.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”
I’m not defending the behavior alleged here but this judge is not the sort of person you want adjudicating serious issues. You don’t fight censorship with blanket bans on speech.
A supporter of free speech should be horrified by this ruling. If you’re not, imagine an injunction of similar scope where the political sides were reversed.
You may disagree with the ruling but if you’re on the side of free speech, you should definitely cheer it.
.. and people are replying to you and _still_ defending the government and think they should have unilateral power over their people
I'm kind of speechless about how many people think this ruling is a bad thing.. like who in the hell out there believes the government should have OPINIONS? Can one of you reply to me?
It's as stupid of a concept as a corporation having an opinion.. opinions are reserved for PEOPLE and I have no idea how you could come up with an argument to change my mind on that.
That doesn't sound right to me. You basically just argued "The purpose of a right to free speech is to protect the right of free speech." It's circular reasoning. Why should free speech be a right?
Out of curiosity I pulled up an article in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
One principle put out by John Stewart Mill is that free speech is valuable because it leads to the truth. If this is correct you should arguably be concerned if the government can't engage in it because we will all be lead away from the truth.
The article says "... arguments show that one of the main reasons for justifying free speech (political speech) is important, not for it's own sake but because it lets us exercise another important value (democracy)."
So if we accept this then if censoring the strong undermines democracy it could be bad, especially if they became strong because the weak elected them into office to represent them.
The article quotes someone who says "Speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced with the precincts of some assumed conception of good."
In other words, don't argue free speech is good because free speech is good.
The injunction says the government can't urge, pressure or encourage censorship. (yes everyone should read it). You have to be joking you think that is a bad thing.
....what.
> Some of the statements that Doughty deemed to be coercion were made in public by Biden and other administration officials. "When asked about what his message was to social-media platforms when it came to COVID-19, President Biden stated: 'they're killing people. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated and that—they're killing people,'" Doughty wrote.
>Various social-media platforms changed their content-moderation policies to require suppression of content that was deemed false by CDC and led to vaccine hesitancy. The CDC became the “determiner of truth” for social-media platforms, deciding whether COVID-19 statements made on social media were true or false. And the CDC was aware it had become the “determiner of truth” for social-media platforms. If the CDC said a statement on social media was false, it was suppressed, in spite of alternative views. By telling social-media companies that posted content was false, the CDC Defendants knew the social-media company was going to suppress the posted content. The CDC Defendants thus likely “significantly encouraged” social-media companies to suppress free speech.
Except that it doesn't say that. It's quite clear that such communication is still perfectly fine when it's for normal gov't operations; I'll quote it below[1].
The folks objecting to this don't make much sense to me. The injunction forbids the gov't from doing the things that the plaintiff complains about. If the gov't isn't currently misbehaving, then the injunction is a No-Op: the government's claimed current state of doing nothing wrong will just continue as is (putatively) already is.
What is lost due to the injunction?
[1] Here are the exceptions to the injunction:
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the following actions are NOT prohibited by this Preliminary Injunction:
1. informing social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies;
2. contacting and/or notifying social-media companies of national security threats, extortion, or other threats posted on its platform;
3. contacting and/or notifying social-media companies about criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections;
4. informing social-media companies of threats that threaten the public safety or security of the United States;
5. exercising permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern;
6. informing social-media companies of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures;
7. informing or communicating with social-media companies in an effort to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity;
communicating with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech ….
[EDIT: fixed formatting]
The argument being pushed is "The government didn't do those things and it's a good thing that it did." Makes perfect sense to me, in the correct context about the ideology of those pushing it.
Likewise if the communique takes place via a memo.
You have a right to communicate what you please you don't have a right to have your thoughts carried by a particular site any more than you have a right to have them posted in the New York Times or relayed on Fox News.
What if, and I'm not suggesting it is, 100% of the posts in question where from foreign actors looking to disrupt the US? Is the government in no way allowed to step in? Is that even censorship?
Governments don't get free speech. They get all sorts of restrictions on them that citizens don't.
I'm just curious, can you tell us what you take issue with?
Free speech cuts both ways. If you’re pleased when a judge bans any and all communication among millions of citizens, you don’t actually value the first amendment, you’re just cheering a partisan victory.
It basically says the govt cannot suppress protected free speech but it can suppress unprotected free speech.
Without ever explaining why the particular speech argued about by the plaintiffs is protected.
Maybe that’s fine for an injunction, but anyone drawing any conclusions about whether the govt suppressed protected free speech from this ruling is highly mistaken.
So e.g. "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech" is obviously unconstitutional. By contrast, "informing social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies" is obviously perfectly constitutional.
The government is still entirely free to post its news, including on social media.
What it’s not allowed to do (at least temporarily) is tell to those organizations what speech it deems unacceptable from US citizens.
This is the entire purpose of the first amendment. This is a huge win for freedom of speech.
The government must not be doing this.
That's plain false. From middle of page 5 there's the list of things explicitly not banned, it starts with "IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the following actions are NOT prohibited by this Preliminary Injunction:".
(3)urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech; (4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;"
Yes, this is a victory for free speech. The aforementioned government officials don't need free speech; we, the taxpayers, do. The government officials have proven they cannot be trusted due to their maligning interests to collude with Big Tech to shill for Big Pharma products. I'm so grateful for some of these federal judges.
This is not a direct ruling, it is an order to cease the current behavior (the gov't telling social media companies to censor speech) until it can be ascertained whether or not this is a harmful thing which is happening.
You're acting as if this injunction creates a law or sets some sort of precedent. It truly does not.
The fact that contempt of court is the only real penalty available for violating this injunction is exactly why it’s harmful. Making ludicrously broad and unenforceable injunctions like this inevitably corrodes the rule of law and damages the overall system.
The First Amendment doesn't just protect people from being imprisoned by the government for their speech. It also prohibits the government from pressuring or coercing private individuals and companies into censoring content. Otherwise, the government could just pressure private entities into doing whatever censorship they want. This isn't a ban on speech, this is a ban on government coercion.
No, it doesn't. See the exceptions on pp 5-6.
"2 “Social-media companies” include Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, Sina Weibo, QQ, Telegram, Snapchat, Kuaishou, Qzone, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, Discord, Twitch, Tumblr, Mastodon, and like companies"
Besides, the government has its own organs at its disposal to communicate with the people.
Was shocking when my messages To friends on Facebook were being blocked.
1984 was meant to be a warning to the masses not a guide on how to oppress people.
What I find of great concern is that the US used to have a strong dissident faction that was against government suppression of basic rights such as free speech.
Now, we have two cheerleading factions.
I feel the division in the country has stoked authoritarian sentiment on both sides as they desperately grasp for measures to suppress each other.
I’d note that a Trump appointed judge in Louisiana giving a preliminary injunction on something uniquely ideologically aligned by those dimensions and is noted in the article as out of step with precedent isn’t the end of the line.
What if that content puts a family at risk?
What if the WH thinks it does, but it isn't obvious to a third party?
Are there any carveouts about how even government employees are private citizens when they don't work in government capacity. Can Amy from the DMV ask to have revenge porn taken down? Can Tim from the IRS tell his wife who works at Twitter that he thinks Elon is a liar and grifter?
> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
False. I think you should edit your comment to remove the false information or acknowledge that you are wrong.
You betcha they'll ignore that law or destroy it once they're back.
100 years ago, I would totally agree that the govt stopping citizens from spreading false information would be a violation of the first amendment. But we now live in a world where the generation of misinformation is automated. Controlling communication on social media does not necessarily imply stifling the speech of a human.
It's very possible that we currently live with an internet where more than half of accounts represent entirely fabricated personas created specifically to generate malicious propaganda. And they know that if they can get a judge to defend their antics as "Free Speech" they will be free to manipulate the general population however they want.
I agree that we need to be careful about protecting free speech online, but if we act like every character that goes over a wire is protected speech, we are digging our own grave.
When society polarizes, it seems that people will stick blindly to their side. Maybe the rational behind that, is that a non-polarized side won't get you as many protections.
HN seems to be non-immune to that. Many people here would like to think that they are smarter than the rest. It does seem from the many discussions here that it's the same homunculus everywhere.
Why is it actionable when you make dangerous public lies that hurt somebody's pocketbook, but not public health?
Secondly, the US constitution says "shall make no law". What law was made here? What legal action was taken? There wasn't even a threat of legal action.
Government workers should be free to contact private organizations and speak to them freely and make requests of them. "The government would like this content taken down for public good" is not making a law, it's making a request. It's making their opinion known, and government functionaries are allowed to have professional opinions. Something like "In my professional opinion as a public health worker, this content is dangerous advice that will get people killed, and in the interest of public safety it would be best if readers were protected from it." That is a reasonable thing for a government-employed professional to do and say.
That said, I think they crossed the line here when it became a demand instead of a request. When the government starts ordering people around instead of just making the public interest known, it can easily be argued there's implied threats there.
IANAL, but I'm assuming in the end that's where this will land during the appeals - that sweeping injunctions against various government bodies communicating with social media companies will be lifted, but the court will find against the government on this case.
A fair point, and I don't disagree at all with this. I only wish to share with you my opinion as a fellow citizen:
I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.
Tangentially, not a small part of the problem may be the government's proclivity to lie to the people. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me..."
EDIT: It might be a useful exercise to consider /why/ we are interested in the freedom of speech issue at a foundational level. I think that due to the speed of modern communication, in a crisis like COVID-19 where people are debating what /must/ be done and there are disagreements, we find that the common road is a hard one to walk and we run out of ways to rationalize a compromise. Maybe this leads us to want a fast fix, limit personal responsibilities so the government has the space to make things nice again.
> I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.
Over the past decade or two with social media we have increasingly seen people are NOT good at deciding what information is useful. A large percentage of the population believes wild folklore, conspiracy theories, etc. We used to live in a truth based society (with occasional issues when lies were presented as truth). We now have a post-truth society where alternative facts are invented at will and displace reality. Worse many of the peddlers of misinformation are just not harmlessly misinformed but know they are lying.
In times of extreme crisis, we do need a quick fix. There simply isn’t time to waste placating people who think injecting bleach will protect them from an airborne illness in a pandemic. We could have spent a decade giving everyone a Master’s in Microbiology and Epidemiology and still not convinced antivaxxers, because they aren’t swayed by facts but by beliefs that feel truthy to them.
The entire point of representative democracy is to avoid the pitfalls of direct democracy which prevents expert analysis and decisions. Modern society is complex enough it has to be guided by subject matter experts. Can you imagine if the simple majority of users of your software got to decide every product decision from now on? Or worse, you had to get approval from the 5% of users that are mad the app doesn’t display Sasquatch’s location?
Personal responsibility has never alone been adequate to deal with the externalities government is uniquely able to fix - war, natural disaster, famine, and pandemics. Collective action is required for these challenges (and more mundane ones like pollution and other externalities). Any society has to be able to balance between the rights of individuals such that a tiny vocal minority can’t overly endanger the continued existence of society. Doing that well, so that nobody is run roughshod over and everyone gets a voice is important. But in extremis we don’t care to compromise with people who are endangering the herd. Humans never have had much tolerance for that.
I say all this knowing authoritarian governments are often able to do their worst abuse in times of crisis. But politely asking Facebook to take down or spread-limit some misinformation that statistically will lead to death isn’t tyranny.
This is a total straw man. Free speech absolutists almost universally acknowledge that fraud, defamation, libel, and narrowly defined incitement are special cases that don't qualify for protection.
With respect to "disinformation", I would challenge you to come up with a strict definition and a framework for applying that designation and see how you might feel about giving that tool to your political opponents.
Criminal defamation laws in the US have been repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional, not by absolutists but by lots of normal working judges.
https://twitter.com/AGAndrewBailey/status/167664657087005491...
You should read the order before you comment on something like this.
But that quote isn’t accurate. The second direct quote in the ruling is there; “legal consequences” is not[1].
I read the whole thing. I don’t think she came close to threatening legal action at any point. So what are we to make of this? I can’t come to any conclusion other than that the judge’s political bias led him to be sloppy about the evidence and misquote government officials in order to bolster his case.
1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
I don't trust anyone to decide what is misinformation or disinformation - that's also something I want to decide for myself.
Something tells me the people here arguing that Flaherty wasn't coercive or threatening would be arguing just the opposite if this was the Trump administration.
Apparently it's about time for our collective citizenry to relearn some generational lessons from history, preferably not the hard way.
The Trump administration was doing the same thing.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
> “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”
With over a million COVID deaths in the US, there's a very valid question to be raised as to when emergency public health requirements take precedence over a right to spread misinformation/disinformation.
Freedom of speech isn't of much use when you're dead.
I'm not arguing which side was right, but I am saying it shouldn't baffle anyone, because it's a complex question with real tradeoffs on both sides. It's not simple black-and-white in the way you're presenting it.
Governments spreading information or halting disinformation exists on a spectrum. This is precisely about where it exists on the spectrum and about balancing rights against harms.
Example. There is a highly experimental vaccine, which is really gene therapy. People are questioning it. Including Mark Zuckerberg, who told all those people not to take it.
But then censored anyone online that wanted to have a discussion about it.
People are reporting severe injuries “including my own wife!” let’s block and ban them too. Big Pharmacy’s got millions to make.
Oh cheap already available treatments seem to work? Let’s ban discussion about those those too. No one can know that possible alternatives exist.
My good, that sounds horrible! Can you share some information? You should go to the media with this. A hidden gene therapy, wow... Which genes are they trying to change in what way?
The large majority of what the government is alleged to have done sounds entirely appropriate to me. The CDC, Surgeon General, and NIAID are responsible for publishing health guidance. This means they will say some things are true and some things are false. They have no power to censor third-party sources and I don't see evidence of even informal pressure. Yet third parties believed this information and used it to determine what posts are true, which sounds to me like these agencies did their job by publishing trustworthy guidance.
Some of the things this court said were factually incorrect. For instance,
>Dr. Francis Collins, in an email to Dr. Fauci told Fauci there needed to be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD—the result was exactly that
Yet in context, you find that the "take down" in question was a published rebuttal, not censorship. This is a lie, plain and simple.
> The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling.
The "story" is that Hunter Biden owned a laptop. The "Hunter Biden laptop story" was very much fake. None of the supposed evidence of corruption existed.
Sure sounds like a relationship where the power only goes one direction and the Flaherty was very comfortable demanding whatever he wanted.
> All, especially given the Journal's reporting on your internal work on political violence spurred by Facebook groups, I am also curious about the new rules as part of the "overhaul."
Referring to this[1] WSJ article that details explicit calls to violence on FB. He then specifically quotes part of FB's response in his question
> I am seeing that you will no longer promote civic and health related groups, but I am wondering if the reforms here extend further?
So Flaherty was absolutely not accusing Facebook "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims", he was accusing FB of hosting actual calls to violence.
[0]https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/174/1/missouri...
I don’t see how you got there. I see literal demands for action in the tone of someone giving orders to a subordinate.
The idea that an imperious tone somehow proves a power imbalance is hilarious to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of these requests from regular people. “I demand an answer right now” is what angry diners say when a restaurant runs of the special. It’s the tone that people adopt to imply power when they don’t actually have power, but want to seem like they do. Which is a common, and legal, mode of speaking in everyday life.
The judge literally cited Biden saying, "they're killing people" as coercion, which is a bald-faced lie.
You're welcome to judge the appropriateness of the event as a whole however you want! I'm not over the moon about it either. I wasn't arguing that it's wonderful this interaction occurred.
the one originating from the dude who used a swear word?
or the one originating from the company who felt comfortable ignoring the dude and the request?
after all, anyone can feel comfortable demanding anything, what matters is what they get:
e.g. TFG felt comfortable demanding that his political rivals be imprisoned, did he get it?
Hopefully this ruling applies to more types of government speech.
The Government cannot demand that political speech be censored without running afoul of the First Amendment.
If you recall, the courts didn't allow Trump to block critical accounts on Twitter.
Not when that someone is the government or its representative. The act of asking can itself be a violation of your rights as there’s an implication that if you do not comply their may be some unknown ramifications.
Judges are savvy enough to know that threats need not be verbalized to be received.
You left a bit out here. He is a representative of the government demanding that a private company censor speech supporting policies it opposes and speech about the president's family among other things.
"A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, 'Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately.'"
I didn’t know that impersonating a public figure was acceptable according to twitter’s terms of service.
Perhaps there was special consideration that permitted an impersonator to remain on the platform?
he's a random government bureaucrat who didn't appear to have any actual power besides sending angry letters, and who Facebook felt totally comfortable ignoring
the article presented a great example proving me right here: even he admits facebook ignored his impotent wails when it didn't suit them to satisfy him
what is this referring to?
Try demanding that a lady give you her purse and see how far that takes you.
Attempting a crime is often a crime regardless if you succeed.
the one originating from the dude who used a swear word?
or the one originating from the company who felt comfortable ignoring the dude and the request?
Jan 6 would like a word. (There's every indication Trump was internally pressuring as President, too, not just via rallies as candidate. https://apnews.com/article/060ca2399a744b4a9554dbd2ec276a90)
> Who did TFG send his demands to?
TFG definitely sent in the same sort of requests. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
> That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company.
> “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”
I think I would drive to the airport, go through security, and fly to DC just to throw a drink in that dumbass’s face and laugh.
This country is officially over.
You don't need to imagine. This happened.
> Left media would scream words like bullying.
That you don't know this happened says everything.
> This gives complete justification and vindication of how the trump admin behaved! Untouchable.
No.
> This country is officially over.
Incorrect, again.
This country’s reputation is built upon the idea of collaboration and compromise. Both administrations behaving with such obtuseness means this is a new chapter.
The Trump administration is being prosecuted over entirely different acts.
The fact that the Biden admin behaved the same way vindicates them from accusations that Trump admin behaved unjustly or they should be disciplined for such inappropriateness.
It's like watching a good software engineer try to build a circuit board without google: I see how you got there, but damn, that's... not gonna work great.
Idk the law either, though, so I can't judge
>However, various emails show Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits through evidence that the motivation of the NIAID Defendants was a “take down” of protected free speech. Dr. Francis Collins, in an email to Dr. Fauci told Fauci there needed to be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD—the result was exactly that.
In reality, the email[0] actually said this:
>There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don't see anything like that online yet - is it underway?
Notice how he removed the word "published" from his quote, making it seem like an instruction to a social media company rather than a published rebuttal. He also mischaracterizes a WH aide's email to FB, claiming that the aid accused FB "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims", when in actuality he was referring to a WSJ article that detailed actual calls to violence on the platform[1].
He also characterizes Twitter's removal of an account with the handle "AnthonyFauci_" as government-directed censorship of parody:
> NIAID and NIH staff sent several messages to social-media platforms asking them to remove content lampooning or criticizing Dr. Fauci . . . An HHS official then asked Twitter if it could “block” similar parody accounts...
But in reality, the contact was initiated by Twitter, who asked the CDC whether the account was real or fake[2]. Why were they confused about this? Because the account wasn't a parody at all; its name was "Dr. Anthony Fauci", its bio was "Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases #NIAID", and there was nothing parodic about its tweets[3][4], which purported to be giving out factual info; it was a straight up impersonation.
On the subject of Dr. Fauci, there's a particularly egregious section where the judge accuses him and other members of NIAID of 'censoring' the so-called Great Barrington Declaration. To support his claim that Reddit and Google censored the GBD at the government's behest, he cites an article[5] that describes how Reddit mods (not Reddit the company!) took down links to the GBD, and complains about the top Google search results for the GBD were all disparaging it, without providing any evidence that either NIAID instructed Google to change the results, or even any evidence that Google purposely changed the results at all. His accusation is that Fauci made public statements 'in collusion' with another employee
>Dr. Fauci testified “it’s possible that” he coordinated with Dr. Collins on his public statements attacking the GBD.
Disparaging the GBD, and that Google and these individual mods in turn took independent action against it. So I guess PSAs are censorship?
Needless to say, there's a lot of issues with this injunction, and from just the small sections I've looked at, it doesn't seem like the judge has applied the necessary rigor to justify a nationwide injunction restricting the government from nearly all contact with various companies and nonprofits. I kind of wish Ars Technics had done some of this scrutiny (which really didn't take that long) before publishing this article.
[0]https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/12/18/23/51969841-10324873...
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=36619117
[2]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
[3]https://twitter.com/merrymanlab/status/1239321484297998336
[4]http://web.archive.org/web/20200313170022/https://twitter.co...
[5]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
Good thing that such an injunction was not issued.
Given all the emphasis you place on paraphrasing things correctly, this seems to be a pretty egregious misrepresentation of the injunction.
> (4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
> (5) collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech;
> (9) requesting content reports from social-media companies detailing actions taken to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content containing protected free speech; and
> (10) notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (“BOLO”) for postings containing protected free speech.
As you'll see from my above post, the judge has a curious idea of what 'inducing' censorship entails (among other things: making public statements that might be heard by Reddit mods, who in turn take it upon themselves to remove links to content).
[0]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
Whether or not any involved content is “explicitly illegal”, they are explicitly permitted to discuss that content so long as it is related to threats to public safety and security of the US, content that may be misleading voters on voting processes, or about content that isn’t Constitutionally protected, among other exceptions; see the explicit exceptions on pp. 5-6. As framed, the exceptions are cumulative and trump the restrictions, so, e.g., a BOLO for content whose context was efforts to protect the public safety and security of the US would permissible under the injunction even if the content was itself Constitutionally protected free speech.
The types of contact that are still allowed are still the vast majority.
The types of contact that are prohibited are those that are potentially viewed as part of efforts to suppress free speech.
I really don't understand the objection unless you support the efforts to suppress this free speech.
(Incidentally, the Ars Technica favicon looks very similar to the ACLU's.)
For proper 1st amendment protection, you should look at FIRE. Like the EFF, they are willing do defend that which they find objectionable - the ACLU no longer does.
We need more people to speak up when those speaking the loudest are wrong, uneducated, and unqualified to speak on the topic they’re preaching.
I get the incentive here, but it’s not the governments place to decide what we do and don’t say.
Society as a whole needs to be better at calling out the lies with hard facts and data. Because right now, it feels like the people with the most effective voices are taking us in the wrong direction.
But fine, let's allow people to speak their piece because bright lines are hard to draw, starting with Twitter, who should be completely free to follow or not follow what the US government says, which is literally what happened here.
This will be overturned on appeal, because the bar for this kind of order is way higher than where the Biden admin was, and for the most part we still care about being consistent when applying the rule of law.
Authoritarian governments love it! All for public safety, that’s the spirit!
“You can’t say that, someone might hate it enough to attack me! Doesn’t matter how true it is!” -any dictator
It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.
Besides which. Both the people that produce the lies, and their supporters, are well aware of the fact that it’s not true. They just choose to ignore that. And any facts and data you are able to compile, will fall on deaf ears.
Great point, free speech is bad. We should repeal the 1st Amendment. /s
How, though? It takes a lot more work to develop an educated opinion than an uneducated one. There will always be more educated speakers than uneducated speakers. And do you really think that, during a pandemic, the best use of an epidemiologist's time is wading into the trenches and fighting every single case of "wrong on the internet"?
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/75e9f7a3-da4e-45af-...
The two big pieces that appear to be driving this coverage are, if true, the following:
"suppressing negative posts about the economy", "suppressing negative posts about President Biden" and, apparently, parodies
There are others, but you could technically claim there is some non-POTUS benefit there so it does not look self-serving.
All in all, so far it is pretty damning, but the private-public partnership has been hailed by some as the best thing since sliced bread ( I am absolutely not joking -- it was only a week since I listened to a Canadian official discussing how well it works for their organization ).
I am not a Trump supporter and I am glad, but I can't help but wonder how much of that is just laying groundwork for 2024 elections.
I didn't see any examples of economic posts at issue, despite it being in the summary.
And the parody accounts seemed to be focused either on (1) non-public figures, like Biden's granddaughter or (2) have resulted in sincere confusion, such as when Twitter actually asked the CDC if a 'parody' account was Fauci's real handle.
You are absolutely right the discovery part and I admit it will likely be something now I will follow more closely ( not completely unlike gems that came out of recent Microsoft/Sony deposition ) despite its political flavor.
<< I didn't see any examples of economic posts at issue, despite it being in the summary.
I disagree here, but I just dislike government overreaching so I also might be overreacting on principle ( and assuming the worst rarely steered me wrong in that realm ).
<< And the parody accounts seemed to be focused either on (1) non-public figures, like Biden's granddaughter or (2) have resulted in sincere confusion, such as when Twitter actually asked the CDC if a 'parody' account was Fauci's real handle.
A parody is a parody is a parody. The backstory is irrelevant for one reason and one reason only. The moment POTUS seemed to implicate himself and his administration in deciding what is kosher, he opened himself to, justifiable, scrutiny and, more importantly, likely eventual mistakes. It can be defended, but the more subtle point is that it should not have happened to begin with.
Not if you want to preserve the system that has even a semblance of pretending to adhere to the original founding principles of this nation.
1. Force twitter, fb, blah blah to shadowban anyone that criticizes their lies
2. Backdoor any device made by Google, Apple, etc.
3. Warrantless wiretap
4. Shove out more lies and goto step 1.
1. They aren't the victims.
2. The individual posters were censored by Facebook et al, not the government, so even they might not have standing. The social networks obviously have standing, but have they complained?
"Facebook likes the President" isn't something you should be able to sue the President for.
> Traditionally, the First Amendment imposes limitations only on “state action, not action by private parties.” Lloyd Corp., Ltd. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, 567 (1972).
> However, plaintiffs “may establish a First Amendment claim based on private conduct if that conduct ‘can fairly be seen as state action.'” Id. (quoting Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830, 838 (1982)).
> the Court instructed that “[i]t is axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Id. (quoting Lee v. Macon Cnty. Bd. of Ed., 267 F.Supp. 458, 475-476 (M.D. Ala.), affd sub nom. Wallace v. U S, 389 U.S. 215 (1967)).
Essentially: yes, you do not have a right to post on Twitter, you cannot sue Twitter for violating your First Amendment rights. But the courts have repeatedly affirmed that this does not create a loophole for the government to launder unconstitutional acts through private parties.
Did you read their legal complaint? It doesn't feel like your statements here are responding to their claims about standing in the complaint.
> Twitter, along with Facebook, implemented measures to block its users from sharing links to the story, and Twitter further imposed a temporary lock on the accounts of the New York Post and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, citing violations of its rules against posting hacked content. The Washington Post reported that this was a result of the company's scenario-planning exercises to combat disinformation campaigns
> Musk tweeted that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government", though Taibbi reported that he found no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story,
> Musk tweeted that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government", though Taibbi reported that he found no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story, tweeting, "Although several sources recalled hearing about a 'general' warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence—that I've seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story."[22][27] His reporting seemed to undermine a key narrative promoted by Musk and Republicans that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories.[22][36]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-in...
If you want to be shocked by influence peddling, just review what and Mr. Kushner did business with while actually being employed by the government.
https://trumpfamilyinfluencepeddling.com/jared-and-ivanka/
> Jared Kushner Held Contacts With Foreign Officials He Did Not Officially Report Or Clear With The National Security Council. “H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s national security adviser, learned that Kushner had contacts with foreign officials that he did not coordinate through the National Security Council or officially report.” [Washington Post, 02/27/18]
> Jared Kushner’s Family Courted “State-Connected Investors” To Bail Out A Kushner Property In Regions In His Government Portfolio While Working In The White House. “And since Mr. Kushner entered the White House, his family has courted state-connected investors in China and the Middle East — both regions that were in Mr. Kushner’s government portfolio — to bail out the firm’s headquarters at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.” [New York Times, 10/11/19]
I am not sure if you remember Comey saga, but remember how carefully some of the statements were worded to satisfy those various sides ( iirc, he wasn't supposed to say Clinton was a suspect and he didn't but instead said something that sounded close to it so press ran with it anyway -- and he could placate both sides saying he did their bidding ).
Its not schizophrenic when you understand how much of a political capital is spent there.
It starts to become the arbiter of moral truth and with out any real moral center it can only but fail spectacularly. The second and third political theories of racial and social idealogies more rapidly succumb to this due to a more overt desire to place the state at this moral centre. But I feel liberalism is ultimately doomed to the same fate, just more by accident.
No matter how individual everyone seems to think they are they still seem to want some sort of collective morality. Maybe because we mostly need to live some sort of relational existence and in the absence of anything else a collective morality will fill that void, but when that reality is so grounded in human will it can get quite corrupted quite quickly.
Desiring the state to more closely model one's personal moral code isn't a signifier that people are placing the state at the "moral center", it's an indicator that they want those with a monopoly on violence to act in accord with what they believe is right.
I do believe the collective moral codes are drifting from those dictated by religions, but I hardly think that is a bad thing, given the rigidity and absolutism of many religions.
We've largely lost the ability to talk about the things themselves, preferring instead to look at things through the tremendously artificial lens of "what do the lawyers say?"
We've outsourced morality to a technocracy.
This does not mean that religion is innocent. That is a fallacy. They are not mutually exclusive. People can do terrible things when guided by religious faith, or when guided by a secular "faith." Both are bad and should be called out.
And just to be clear, we're contrasting this time of unprecedented peace with entities that have killed in spasms of violence with no apparent public casus belli than "my book is better than your book and it told me to do so?"
Spasms that, in one set of instances, led to the deaths of a significant fraction of the global population?
“Estimates of the number of people killed in the Crusades begin at 1 million (Wertham…) and go as high as 9 million (Robertson…) passing through 3 million (Garrison…) and 5 million (Elson…) along the way. I took the low middle (Garrison’s estimate) as my estimate. The geometric means of the extremes is 3 million.” Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (2012), p. 576 (see f.n. 1 under The Crusades).
NAZI 'DIVINE RIGHT' TO RULE ASSERTED; Dr. Ley Says Reich's 'Mission' to Dominate Other Nations Is Among War Aims WOULD WIPE OUT BRITAIN 'Annihilation' of Obstacle to German Destiny Demanded by Labor Front Head
Or, doctrines like "Manifest Destiny" that were religious in origin and preached in church?
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo...
The only way to end the cycle of violence is by embracing the scientific method, rationality, and empathy. Anything else is a step to madness. Voltaire said it best,
There have been people who once said, you believe incomprehensible, contradictory, impossible things, because we have ordered you to do so; therefore do unjust things because we order you to do so. These people reasoned wonderfully. Certainly, whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust.
Ah, my child, as long as people continue to believe absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities!
The last 196-years of secular government has killed, let's just say, way more than ~1.0-1.7 million people. Even the nice ones like France, which killed ~1.5 million Algerians from 1954 to 1962, so small by comparison to other atrocities you probably didn't even hear about it. That's before even considering the Reign of Terror, Communist Governments of all kinds, US Forced Sterilization in the name of science for decades, and on and on.
And as for the Spanish Inquisition, despite the horrible memory, modern estimates now show the total death count was about 3,000-5,000 people over a 350 year time span. At worst, 14 executions per year. Secular courts were far less forgiving. Even Wikipedia has updated their numbers accordingly.
Social media is just the latest of them. For example, relatively traditional companies like credit card companies have disproportionate power in deciding whether transactions are allowed or not, regardless whether they're legal. Often they refuse to process transactions for industries apparently out of "moral" reasons.
Governments are actually becoming less influential because laws don't reach beyond their borders. Yet multinational companies often have monopolistic power and influence over many important aspects of people's lives.
I am currently reading The Brothers Karamazov and recorded a couple quotes from the chapter I'm currently in (Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor) about freedom and religion, which seem too poignant to pass up right now. Not that I think religion is the answer to the problem. Here's one of my favorites:
"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it...what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and all of humanity from the beginning of time."
This just tells me that there is no solution to this foible of human nature and that we are doomed to a future of dissatisfaction, and we'll invent endless ways to keep fighting.
I'm not saying we should do nothing. I'm just so tired, it seems so obvious, yet the path is not clear at all.
In the mundane it's our relation to ourselves and the world, but they are very fluid and chaotic. The believe in the metaphysical provides a means to ground a relation outside the chaotic uncertain reality, which can be very comforting and liberating.
Does anybody have any citations to backup this point?
The problem is the challenge of scalable applied philosophy. What name we affix to that challenge is less relevant than the challenge itself.
1. Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.
2. Granting a preliminary injunction is a long way from winning a case.
3. There is pressure and there is pressure. "Social media companies should suppress X" is fine. "if they don't I will audit the fuck out of their taxes" is not. The "bully pulpit" has long been used for this purpose and is the president's only real power beyond bombing things and vetoing stuff...
4. How does this affect executive actions pressuring 101 other companies to do things that are MUCH more questionable (everything from giving the NSA access to private data to bullying companies into censoring movies)?
Edit:
5. Plenty of Senators have gone on record demanding platforms make changes or face some or other legislative punishment. I wonder how/if this affects that?
The injunction is almost more the point of these cases.
If someone goes forum shopping, they have a decent chance of shutting down whatever Democratic policy they want until the injunction can be appealed. Or worse, a narrow injunction can conflict with a national injunction, which puts an administration in the position of choosing which binding injunction to follow. This recently occurred with an abortion drug [0].
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/07/1159220452/abortion-pill-drug...
The cited behavior is egregious, with Flaherty issuing orders and requesting specific takedowns, and doing so in an unprofessional and threatening manner that shows he is unfit for office. It's clear overreach beyond broadcasting the Executive's concerns about public health and requesting that companies do their part to help.
The injunction may go too far in the other direction (but it is temporary), in the final ruling maybe less limiting to the Administration, but behavior like Flaherty's should be reined in.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/missouri-v-bid...
To a first approximation, the appellate system is the only real mechanism for oversight of federal judges not engaging in outright misconduct. This is why packing the federal judiciary with intemperate partisans is so dangerous.
Maybe it's true for individual speech in the limited sense of them just speaking (not broadcasting)?
They don't, they just choose to do so. It's the same way pundits, authors, and broadcasters often get labeled "right-wing" or "conservative" while similarly left-wing ones don't get labeled. It's an editorial choice to call the reader's attention to it and imply relevance.
Beyond that, I think this is unique relative to the normal "bully pulpit" pressure in that:
* It's being used in order to suppress speech and opposition to the administration's policies, and
* It was being done in secret, not exposed until later, and has otherwise shown no signs of stopping
That makes it a bit different from, say, publicly pressuring lawmakers to reduce tariffs on sugar.
It's only relevant to this story to imply that its causal, i.e., an impartial judge might not have made the ruling. Or to your point, "this wouldn't have happened if Obama's appointee were there." It's openly questioning the judge's ability to be neutral.
Regardless, though, I'm OK with it as long as it's labeled every time a Clinton, Obama, or Biden-appointed judge makes a decision that could be framed as political. That doesn't happen, though.
Which is even weirder when we consider that being "right wing" is considered bad but "left wing" is not. When in reality during the 20th century, far left wing political organizations have been responsible for the deaths of 10's of millions more than far right parties. Being a Nazi is bad but being a Communist is far worse if history is any indicator. But you'd never know it by how much of the media frames things.
“Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people’. This term automatically made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man be proven,” Khrushchev said in his secret address to the Communist party’s inner circle.
“It made possible the use of the cruellest repression, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations.”
That's how the right behaves today, which is why the right is dangerous. Communism vs. capitalism doesn't mean a thing if the person in charge is a deranged, power-hungry, narcissistic dictator.
5. That's clearly the Legislature's job. The Legislature is not the Executive. They make new law, not apply existing law.
The current movie (and TV and music) censorship regimes are all based on an agreement between producers that they will not produce/distribute etc material that is legal but "bad" and in exchange the government will take no action against them like tax hikes etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
This is how the US has handled all sorts of "censorship that's not technically censorship" since day 1. The actions here seem to be basically the same thing but in our era it's social media not rap music or sitcoms.
It matters because Trump appointed, and the GOP Senate confirmed, a batch of federal judges who the bar association determined were Not Qualified, because they were found to be lacking in "integrity, professional competence or judicial temperament."
The past two GOP presidents have eschewed bar association recommendations entirely and instead had their judicial appointments selected by the right-wing Federalist Society.
Minor nitpick - Judge Terry Doughty's confirmation was bi-partisan. There were 98 votes in favor, no votes against, and only 2 abstaining. Even Bernie Sanders voted in favor of the confirmation.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
But censorship pressure very much happened on “both sides”.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...
See for example another nominee:
> On December 1, the Eleventh Circuit ordered the case to be dismissed because Cannon "improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction" over it.[64][65][66][67][68] The Eleventh Circuit stated that Trump needed to show that the case met all four criteria under the Richey test for equitable jurisdiction over lawsuits for seized materials, but failed to do so for any criteria.[69][70][71] The Eleventh Circuit found that under Cannon, "the district court stepped in with its own reasoning" multiple times to argue in favor of Trump, sometimes even taking positions that Trump would not argue before the appeals court.[72][73][74] The Eleventh Circuit also found that when Trump did not explain what materials he still needed returned, or why, the "district court was undeterred by this lack of information".[69][75][76]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Cannon#Trump_v._United_...
The panel that over-ruled Cannon were also majority-Trump nominees:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/thorough-...
So it may be 'just' that particular judges are incompetent (which you would hope would be discovered in some kind of vetting process).
Did Obama ever nominate a judge that’s never tried a case in front of a court and failed to disclose his marriage to the White House counsel’s chief of staff?
Oh wait, he’s not. So whatever ad homs you have about him are irrelevant here.
And further, Trump's actions were fairly wild & chaotic & needed restraint.
>Several of the messages came from Rob Flaherty, former deputy assistant to the president and director of digital strategy, who criticized Facebook over its handling of COVID misinformation.
>Doughty said that one Flaherty message in February 2021 accused Facebook "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims." Flaherty also wrote in a July 2021 email to Facebook, "Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."
>A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately."
In my opinion there is a big difference between the President saying in a speech that social media should do something versus what is revealed here.
I'm over this illusion of privacy.
If you are asking if we should spend less on spying, sure, but that could be my ignorant teens when I was an anarchist talking.
The government has the ability to prosecute crimes, and has a monopoly and the use of force. Private companies have neither.
One of the two is clearly more dangerous if they have the ability to control your speech.
Isn't all that optional though? If I don't use gmail or apple's services, I'm essentially opting out. Also to this sibling reply, when was the last time Apple broke down someone's door, threatened to kill them, threw them on the ground, beat them up and tased them?
>If you are asking if we should spend less on spying, sure, but that could be my ignorant teens when I was an anarchist talking.
You're deeming the desire for privacy as anarchism? What a warped sense of perspective that is. When I was in my teens, we actually had privacy, because that time period was before 9/11. Perhaps you're just accustomed to being spied on and you're experiencing Stockholm syndrome.
In a common carrier world, the government censoring private individuals would go against our first amendment rights. Pretty clear cut.
Ideally we eventually reach p2p social networking protocols. I don't want my interest or attention graph dictated or influenced by a third party. I want to be able to (de)weight and (de)prioritize based off of my own personal preferences.
That's called the internet.
Corporations having the right to censor is no better than the government.
Yes it is, there are lots of corporations and anyone can start one. There is only one government that applies to someone at any one time and they have a monopoly on violence.
In a common carrier world, the government censoring private individuals would go against our first amendment rights. Pretty clear cut.
It's clear cut that the internet does that already and corporations do not have to broadcast what they don't want to.
If you hate censorship so much why are you on hacker news? This is one of the most censored sites on the internet. Comments are not just deleted and removed but there is no record when they are.
There are plenty of sites that let anyone post whatever they want and they turn into people spamming nazi propaganda. You can find these sites and see if you like them better than the mainstream sites of the internet.
Please tell me how to start a Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter and reach their scale and engagement. Preferably up and running with billions of users by tomorrow.
Your suggestion is implausible and denies the reality that these entities are entrenched and more or less here to stay.
> If you hate censorship so much why are you on hacker news?
You want me to leave because I hate censorship? Same argument as "If you don't like America, then leave." Systems can be improved. Just because we don't like the status quo doesn't mean we want to throw everything out. This is a shallow dismissal of the free speech argument.
> There are plenty of sites that let anyone post whatever they want and they turn into people spamming nazi propaganda. You can find these sites and see if you like them better than the mainstream sites of the internet.
Again, clearly not what I'm advocating for here. Not all discourse turns to "Nazism" (as liberals say) or "kiddie diddling" (as conservatives say). I operated forums back in their 2000-2010 heydey that had a free speech policy. People behaved, and we all learned a lot. The only reason corporations have the market share now is that they blitzscaled to critical mass.
My argument stands. The ideal social media system is a p2p protocol that nobody can exert undue control or influence over. That everyone can tailor as they so please.
Racial discrimination in state-operated schools is barred by the Constitution and "[i]t is also axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458, 475-476 (MD Ala. 1967).
Big Tech did its bro-thing and they're cool - they're getting away with it.
The WH, however, cannot do what they did and they're getting hammered for it.
Oh wait.
This isn't far fetched, many people have gotten crushed or trampled in a panic and died as a result.
https://twitter.com/kevinnbass/status/1674920880219234304
I agree they should be charged with manslaughter for all the blood clots, heart disease and cancers they caused among young people.
So, what was the egregious offense, endangering all of society by words alone, uttered by by Schenck? This "yelling fire in a crowded theater"? Charles Schenck was a member of the local Socialist party, and was distributing fliers urging draft age men to oppose the draft (for World War 1) on the grounds that it entailed involuntary servitude, outlawed by the 13th amendment.
So there's your "yelling fire in a crowded theater" when you concede your right of free speech to the government.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
These days when I see a argument based on metaphor, I just ... disengage.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Any view that you do not approve of is not disinformation.
Also, you are smart enough to recognize disinformation.. but you think everyone else around you is too gullible and would fall prey to "disinformation"
Once the disinformation starts to propagate then the downstream propagandists may believe they are spreading legitimate truths, but ultimately by definition the disinformation can be traced to a source that intended to deliberately disinform.
Also, not everyone around us needs to be gullible for disinformation to work. In the US for example we live in a country where national elections are routinely decided on razor thin margins, where just a couple of percent or less can flip the results. We also live in a nation where 32% of people believe in ghosts [0]. So there are enough gullible people for the type of disinformation that wouldn't persuade a reasonable person to still yield powerful results.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-g...
If the concept of ghosts are disinformation, who's the person that intentionally planted this seed? Even if that's the case, you'd have to go back thousands of years at least.
You seem to be convinced that ghosts don't exist. Why is that? Note that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Among the millions of potentially fraudulent claims from people reporting to have seen ghosts, just one legit claim would suffice to contradict your premise. I don't know how good those odds are, but I'm guessing they're probably not as bad as you seem to believe.
On the contrary, the claim that "ghosts don't exist" seems to be a prime candidate for being disinformation. Pretty useful thing for secular institutions to have the population believe (regardless of its truth value) if only to wrestle power away from religious and spiritual institutions.
The power to control what can and can't be shared between people corrupts just like any other power.
So we shouldn't. Route around the unsolvable problem. Find another way.
What is even disinformation in this climate other than a comfort blanket for those unable to form an actual argument?