I think that’s a simplistic view. No one is arguing Twitter is comparable to a store with a display window. The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. It’s a new reality. It’s a newspaper where anyone and everyone is authoring anything, including presidents, and with the roll of a die, the message is amplified to a multiple of the expected audience.
Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
>it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
But that's not what this is really about.
This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future. It's about fears of a nonexistent conspiracy controlling the media becoming the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace - a phenomenon which never goes well, historically. It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.
> This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future.
That is the impetus in this case, but that doesn't mean it doesn't border on questions we've been slowly grappling with for some time now, nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.
> the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace
I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it? In a sense, I think it's an interesting question, if you're willing to editorialize content on behalf of your users why should you get safe-harbor protection? You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?
> It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.
What's the obvious First Amendment violation here? If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech. We're just bringing "content neutral providers" into the same realm that everyone else already was.
>I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it?
If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.
>nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.
We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
>What's the obvious First Amendment violation here?
The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
Granted, the First Amendment only explicitly applies to Congress, but I feel like if states can be accused of violating it (as they often were regarding quarantine and shelter-at-home orders) then the President can as well.
> If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.
This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
> We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
Exactly why Twitter needs to be stripped of their 230 protections.
> The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
This is the government upholding free speech. Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech. This holds Twitter accountable for their "un-American" practices.
Although it may be hard to see through the vitriolic debates currently raging, this will be a net win for the internet. This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
> This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
Debatable, on both points. There have been studies[1] that show that accounts are banned, but it's not necessarily because they are conservative accounts or conservative content. In a civil or criminal case, causation must be established. In this case, the president is making it very much more expensive for certain companies to defend themselves.
This EO is more likely to hurt YouTube than Twitter because it has the ability to get the Federal Government to no longer approve grants to Google subsidiaries and for government agencies to stop advertising with them.
> to be stripped of their 203 protections.
You mean The Communications Decency Act, Section 230?
> Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech.
That's interesting. Government law enforcers and prosecutors have the ability to use prosecutorial discretion. Are you saying that the government should be able to select who they prosecute, but that private organizations should not be allowed discretion to enforce their own contracts?
If ISPs (where content in a pipe is pretty close to comparable to Common Carrier standards) can't be held up to the standards of Net Neutrality, how can social media companies (where content is much more subjective to interpret as violations of their contract)?
> this will be a net win for the internet
That remains to be seen. I can see it being another tool where the executive branch gets to unilaterally change the definition of which internet companies get protections, not leveling the playing field.
> This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
More likely there will be some obvious "unintended consequences" similar to what happened after Trump signed the FOSTA bill in 2018[2] (hint: multiple dating sites, including Craigslist sections, closed up shop). It will very likely increase the cost of being a user-generated content host to the point that only a very select few companies would do it and they will all require arbitration clauses in the ToS to avoid extremely expensive litigation of the CDA230 rules. I expect a handful of forums and lots of news comments sections to close due to this "free speech" Executive Order.
So by your understanding of the First Amendment, if you had a blog with a comment section, I could come by and post spam, or troll and harass other users and you have no right to stop me?
Are you required to let me organize a protest in your front yard? Do property rights not matter anymore?
>thats an interestating take, considering trump is trying to stop the selective editorialization of individuals covered by the first amendment.
Again, the first amendment protects those individuals from being censored by the government. Twitter is not bound by the first amendment. They're allowed to editorialize content. They're allowed to curate, moderate, deplatform and ban people.
However, Twitter is also protected by the first amendment, and Trump's executive order is an attempt to erode those protections.
>are we really taking twitters side of this because we hate trump so much?
No. I believe in the right of platforms to censor content as an extension of their own freedom of speech and association, because that still leaves the internet itself free. If one objects to Twitter's behavior, one can always find a new platform or create one. However, when the government attempts to assert censorship over the entire network, that reduces freedom for everyone.
The executive order is not touching the protections of the first amendment. The courts are still to protect them for that as always.
The order regards the additional protections of section 230 which even protect twitter for content that is not protected by the first amendment. Trump is essentially trying to say if Twitter takes sides by fact-checking some tweets, then they are also responsible for all the other "facts" they allow to be posted on their platform without fact-checking. And by the way the courts are still perfectly capable of deciding in favor of twitter regarding blame for all those other posts too. Twitter just won't be shielded by a special law from such decisions.
Anyone who replies to you is guilty of selective editorialization of an individual covered by the first amendment. Except me. I'm not expressing an opinion. It seems unwise in an age like this.
Trump is the head of the government. In his role, he is attempting to control private enterprise (and failing). It is laughable that you think him a victim given that he has the full force of the federal government at his beck and call. The fact that he has cried like a child about this is embarrassing, petulant, and disgusting.
The talk is about rolling back special privileges that platforms get. Privileges that you and I don't have. If you publish something illegal then you bear the consequences. If a user on Twitter does it then Twitter doesn't bear the consequences, but the user does instead. Doesn't this mean it's the user that's expressing speech rather than Twitter?
> If you publish something illegal then you bear the consequences.
So let's look at today. You have a tweet from a conservative group that "concludes" that the only way forward for America is violent action, up to and including murder of political opponents. "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat".
To me, it seems that there is a plausible argument to be made that this group is inciting violence.
And then Trump re-tweeted it, with the additional commentary, "Thanks, Cowboys of America!".
If we want to compare "consequences of speech and platforms", then on one hand we have hand-wringing about "Twitter _annotated_ a tweet with links to resources about the substance of that tweet", versus "group hints at violent oppression of political opponents, and is given the thumbs up by political leader".
I was going to say "I know which one I find more problematic", but lest someone attempt a slippery slope retort, I'll be more clear: I find only one of these actions at all problematic (and it's not annotation of tweets).
If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech.
There's some merit to that position, but things like adding a fact check (which you might or might not agree with) do not incur any sort of civil or criminal liability. You make good points, but we should also engage with the reality that the president and his supporters are demanding a quality of representation/protection for their political views that they don't have any particular entitlement to, and for which no mechanism currently exists in law; it seems (going by the general tenor of their arguments over the last few years) like they want to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine' that obtained for broadcast media up to the Reagan era to create some protected space for their viewpoint.
> You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?
Power and technology can't curate content to the level where you are safe from lawsuits. What you're saying is that if they are willing to do a bit of moderation they should do total moderation.
2. What was drafted last summer was legislation. Legislation that would likely not stand up to political or legal resistance. This is an executive order to make an end-run around all that "bureaucracy".
> has little to do with the recent twitter news.
This fails the plausibility test. This came hot on the heels of this incident, Trump _said_ it was related to this incident, and that he'd be doing this as result, and the last several years are packed with a multitude of examples of exactly that: Trump knee-jerking an angry response (words, actions, both) to those who he deems to have slighted him.
Newspapers do that because they are liable for what they publish. Twitter is not liable for what it publishes. Why should it not be liable? The answer is because they are just providing a platform and others are publishing. But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?
If someone uploads their library of child porn encoded to base64 split across tons of tweets, do you want Twitter to have a choice between removing that content and continuing to operate?
We have 3 options here:
1. No moderation allowed whatsoever on a site without a court order. That obviously leads to a terrible, toxic community with lots of reprehensible content that the average person wouldn't want to participate in.
2. A good faith effort at moderation. This allows the most reprehensible, highest-impact content to be removed and allows users to participate in the moderation process.
3. No content can be published without moderation, on any site anywhere. Want to post a Facebook status? Have fun paying $20 for the privilege of waiting 48 hours for a human to review it.
All of this is irrelevant though, because this executive order is not targeted at censorship. It's targeted at a private individual who voluntarily, for free, passed on a message from one person to many other people and decided to tell them "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it."
Twitter is actually required by law to remove child porn, not being forced to keep it up, that would be insane. This isn't a call for no moderation, it is a call for a neutral platform when companies are on the verge of monopolies. They are definitely monopolize your followers, switching platforms is not even a choice. You can work you're entire life building a channel and audience on social media site and they can take it away in a heartbeat and you don't even get a chance to let your followers know what happened, e-mail them even, let them know where they can find you going forward. That's not the worst part, the worst part is they can and do do it without any reason whatsoever, it could be just because someone at the company dislikes what you said. Again this is not about moderation, this is about companies that were built off of being a neutral platform that cannot be sued for liability, like a phone company but are now using their monopoly over your follower's information to hold over you and control what you say. If anything what really needs to be in legislation is rights to notify followers where else they can find you if you are banned or censored.
There exist many more options and law is notorious for having grey zones where the complexity of context, and intent and outcomes.
In the specific example of child porn, would removing it be protected speech and a copyrightable work? To my knowledge, no, it is not.
However telling someone "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it.", attached to someone else copyrighted work, is to me speech. It is also a copyrightable work if its original enough. It could also be a defined as a derivative work if it includes major copyrightable elements of the original, which in this context is likely.
The difference between removing child porn and creating derivative work is one that I don't think courts will have a problem to distinguish between. Both may end up being described as moderation, but the outcome, intent and context is very different.
Why have a Supreme Court or even normal Judges if Laws are only allowed to be this binary? Why not option 4 you are allowed to censor if you give reason and the reason is in your TOS. But you are for example not allowed to Edit (Fact Check), Censor or manipulate Votes of your political opponents, or loose your libel protections.
Twitter isn't liable for illegal content posted by their users, as long as they take it down in time and make good faith efforts to keep it from being posted in the first place. If they weren't free from liability then a service like Twitter would need heavy human moderation and be extremely expensive to operate - perhaps it wouldn't exist at all.
That's the only reason this non-liability exists. It has nothing to do with moderation or censorship. Twitter, as any other web property, have the right to curate their platform and make it pleasant for their other users. It's their personal property.
but newspapers aren't required to express support for particular political candidates or viewpoints. That can get into trouble for publishing libel, ie maliciously presenting false statements as fact, but the criteria for what constitutes libel are very narrow. A newspaper can certainly publish an opinion like 'Politician X is a fool whose proposal should be ignored.'
> But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?
They've always done some editing and removal of certain content.
In this particular case, was anything modified or censored though? It seems more like Trump had his say, and Twitter had theirs. Is Trump saying that Twitter can't also express themselves on their platform?
> But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?
There are degrees to moderation, but not to liability. This black or white approach doesn't seem appropriate. They should be liable in a degree proportional to the moderation they introduce.
Newspapers hire and pay people to write for them and exercise editorial control on everything that's published.
That's very different from, say, a public restroom where people write on the walls. The owner of the restroom is not responsible for what people write on their walls.
And that's totally fair, because the hired the person, vouched for them, submitted them to editorial scrutiny an, still, decided to publish defamatory content.
It would be, if the owner began editorializing the content, because the point at which they get involved, they lose neutrality, and therefore Section 230 immunity protection.
The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people.
No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.
it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
It's technically trivial to create your own Twitter. There are indeed plenty of competitors to Twitter. Twitter has no moral or ethical obligation to carry lies. Indeed, the opposite is true: because of their market position, they should be ethically and morally obligated to prevent lies from being spread through their platform because they have the greatest reach.
>No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.
Would you make this same argument when it comes to privacy? Technically it's your computer sending your data to Google/Facebook, therefore you are giving them permission to use your data, because you're so generously providing it to them. Technically this is true and any real privacy solution would have to address this point, but it's clearly not what is done in legislation.
When you send your data to Google or Facebook by explicitly providing that data, you are giving them permission to use that data for purposes of providing the service for which the data is granted. This is true everywhere, even in the EU.
If you're asking whether that upload would grant Googlebook broader rights to use your data, then the answer is yes in the US because there are no laws currently restricting such use, but no in Europe because EU law says permission must be explicitly granted for other uses.
I think you're overestimating the number of users. Hardly anyone I know uses Twitter. It may be a big thing for you but it's largely irrelevant for others. It's an opt-in service
Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.