Election Day 2020: Open Thread, Breaking News, and Running Discussion

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Um, you do realize that it’s entirely legal for a company to take a political position? Twitter could literally delete every Twitter by everyone their algorythm detects as as Republican. They could even send voting reminders to everyone they think is a Democratic and not Republican.

Welcome to Citizens United!

About the only thing they can’t do would be to explicitly boost Biden’s campaign’s tweets, as that might be ‘coordination’. Not sure, but they should be safe instead of sorry. They cannot ‘coordinate’ with the campaign.

But they can delete whatever they want to, they can delete every positive mention of Trump, and promote every positive mention of Biden, and give a huge platform to any sort of Democrat as long as that Democrat isn’t actually part of the campaign. And literally bar any Republicans they want.

Again, welcome to Citizens United, where corporations have first amendment rights. And just like _I_ have the first amendment right to exclude someone from my house because they are supporting a specific political candidate, Twitter does too.

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And before you start talking about Section 230, be aware that Trump’s reading of that is actually very stupid, and says that literally any moderation besides ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable’ content opens web sites up to a lawsuit…which is a really absurd concept, it would mean that moderators couldn’t delete non-porn spam messages, or have _topics_ for various forums.

“We tested, and Ordinary Times filtered a comment that was just a bunch of affiliate links to car parts on sale at Amazon! None of those car parts were vaguely lewd, and the URLs certainly weren’t. By moderating that comment, OT has shown they are not covered under the protection of Section 230, and thus can be sued for hosting any user-posted content that violates copyright or is libelous.”Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Corporations have equal protection of their constitutional rights under the law. The was literally the point of Citizens United.

And thus, the government creating specific rules that treat _a specific person’s_ (Which Twitter is.) speech differently is almost certainly a bill of attainder, and unconstitional.

The government can’t pass a law makging George Turner more civially liable for his speech than everyone else, and it can’t pass one making Twitter that either.

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Oh, incidentally, this wouldn’t work anyway! Section 230 exists to clarify a single bad court decision. That decision is Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co, and it said that moderation made someone a publisher. In 1995. Before the actual internet was opened to the public.

There is no way the courts would come to the same decisions _currently_. Because, again, they would hestitate before destroying the internet.

So if Section 230 was repealed because everyone (Including the Democrats, which obviously would have to agree to such a change in the law.) was incredibly stupid, the courts would probably look back to the original court case about this, Smith v. California (1959), which is where that distinction originally came from , and decide that distinction was _incorrectly_ decided in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.

Because in Smith, the court pointed out that distribution has a key role in first amendment rights, and that distributors have _a choice in what they distribute_. They have a choice in what they sell and shelf. So the distributor in Smith was _also_ moderating content. In fact, the case was literally about him being required, by law, to moderate content! It was an obscenity case.

And yet the entire premise of Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co is that moderation of content somehow made people a publisher instead of a distributor, under the Smith distrinction! Huh? The logic simply isn’t there, and Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co was decided wrongly. (And the courts never fixed it because the legislature did first.)

The Surpreme Court, if asked now, would probably say that moderating posts, just like ‘moderating’ what books are for sale by a bookseller, is not publishing, and the threshold to publishing is ‘non-automated alteration or suggestion of alterations of content’ or something like that.

I.e, that being a publisher requires someone acting as ‘editor’, or having some role in the creation of content, and _not_ simply picking and choosing which content they pass along.

That’s where I would guess the courts would go. And note that just gets someone to ‘distributor’, but courts have held you can’t hold someone liable for merely unknowingly distributing libel.

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Now, in a sane world, we could regulate Twitter, not via libel laws (Which is an insane misuse of the law anyway!) because they _have no first amendment rights_, and we could demand they operate more as a common carrier, or create a new category that allows moderation for specific things but not other things. Everything I said above only applies to people with first amendment rights, and in a sane world, Twitter would not be one of those ‘people’.

Welcome, again, to Citizens United.

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Actually, I kinda want to repeat the point I just parenthesised above, and show just how dangerous conservatives are: George is suggesting that if Twitter decides it wants to operate AS A LIBERAL PLATFORM, that it should be stripped of its protection AGAINST LIBEL SUITS.

You will notice those two things are unrelated, and you will also notice he’s just suggesting this for Twitter, and not, for example, the comments section of townhall.com. He’s not suggesting that ‘Corporations shouldn’t be able to have political biases’, which is something that possibly could be defended, I guess (Even I don’t go that far!), he is instead suggesting that a specific corporation with a wide reach isn’t allowed to have a _liberal_ bias.

This is how conservatives think. That the government should just just punish people, or even corporations, for having the wrong political option. If they can figure out some way to do it legally.Report