Social media and the 1st Amendment (Formerly: Trump seeks to punish Twitter) (2 Viewers)

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    superchuck500

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    Despite Twitter historically granting Trump far more latitude with violations of Twitter terms of service than average members would get, a recent tagging of a Trump tweet with Twitter's fact-checking tool enraged the president. He announced yesterday that he will take retribution via executive order seeking to remove statutory legal protections in place for social media companies, and instructing his executive agencies (the FCC an DOJ) to formulate plans to take legal action against social media companies for "political bias."

    A draft of the order has been released . . . and it is troubling to say the least.

    According to analysis, the order will "reinterpret" a key provision of the Communications Decency Act (Sec. 230) that previously protected social media companies for responsibility for the content on their sites. That section works by declaring that social media companies are not "publishers" of the content posted by third-party account holders (members) - and it is statutory. The Trump order apparently also instructs the FCC to create regulations to make this new "interpretation" of Sec. 230 actionable against social media companies. In addition, the order apparently instructs the FTC (which is not an executive agency) to report to Congress on "political bias" in social media - and to consider using the reinterpreted Section 230 to bring actions against social media companies for political bias.

    Apparently the order also instructs DOJ to work with state AGs to determine what state laws may be used against social media companies for political bias.

    So yep, a Republican president is attempting to restructure the statutory framework that has allowed American social media companies - which are private business by the way - to grow into corporate giants without having to be answerable in court for the content posted by their members. And will do so based on the notion that private business should be held to some standard of political neutrality.

    Further legal analysis will be needed, but it seems highly suspect on several important grounds (including the fact that Section 230 is statutory and is very explicit - it's not subject to rewrite by executive order). More importantly this idea that "political bias" can be defined and made actionable by federal agencies against private companies seems a patent violation of the First Amendment.



     
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    It’s clear that FB is probably the worst offender as far as being manipulated and sharing disinformation. I saw where FB‘s own algorithms will push any person towards extreme views over time. This was on TV, so I don’t have a link, maybe one of you know more about this.

    If these algorithms do tend to steer people toward extreme views, in any direction or topic, we may have a contributing factor for our extreme divisiveness that is only getting worse it seems. And possibly the “dumbing down” that I am seeing, where people believe crazy conspiracy theories over established science.
     
    How are they making that happen? Has Facebook really become that overrun with middle-aged to elderly white people?

    Some of my younger team members are all about Ben Shapiro, he passes for an intellectual, sadly. I think Breitbart appeals to a younger, mostly male audience. I know the stereotype of the Fox viewer is an older person, but I think there’s a significant amount of 30-50 year olds who also over consume Fox, which I view as sort of a gateway drug to all sorts of bad choices. 😁
     
    Katie Hopkins, former Apprentice contestant and blatant racist and someone Trump likes to re-tweet, was permanently booted of Twitter yesterday, so that's good news.

    Facebook is a total cesspool. I understand Twitter can be an awful place, too, without a doubt. But Facebook as a place that targets a specific demographic and caters to their close-mindedness is a special breed of cesspool.

    North Face just took their page down off of Facebook as part of a business-boycott of Facebook. And shortly after that REI joined, too. These are the biggest names so far. I'm interested to see how much further it goes.

    But his latest strategy strikes me as someone who wants to have his cake and eat it, too. I'm not versed in all this business stuff so I'll admit that this is a totally unschooled opinion and biased because I want to see him have to make an actual decision.

    I see lip service paid against some of Trump's rhetoric with some token gestures toward separating himself from Trump, but at the same time a lot of pro-Trump propaganda is being allowed because it's clear it drives clicks and views and ad revenues. It seems he can also plausibly give himself an out for being against Trump's divisive rhetoric if it ends up being too costly. While I don't know business, I know ambiguity and equivocating rhetoric and that is what this strikes me as.

    What staying power does Facebook have if it's not catering to this demographic? Young people are not using it. The stock price has done pretty well over the last five years and to keep it profitable, where do you go? This isn't an 18-34 demographic. Who gets targeted next? Serious question, because I'm not an ad guy.

    I do not, however, trust Zuckerberg to come remotely close to a moral or ethical decision.

    He's three algorithms standing on top of each other in a suit.
     
    Some of my younger team members are all about Ben Shapiro, he passes for an intellectual, sadly.

    the fact he passes for an intellectual is sad. That sycophantic circle is getting weirder. I've been following Shapiro and Kirk and Walsh and Owens and their like for a while and I'm seeing more re-tweeting and linking to people who are more marginalized, right opinions. Posobiec, Coulter, Cernovich are coming up more often and it seems to me that the drive is to appeal even more to hard right opinions, and giving up at least the premise of periodic objectivity.

    Crowder has totally done the same. And Tim Pool used to be somewhat reasonable from time to time, but has given up on admitting when he was wrong which he would also do from time to time.

    The right is desperate for there to be younger voices. It's the primary draw for Charlie Kirk's Turning Points USA, which is an organization that is ostensibly for free speech of conservative voices on university campuses, but has a history of racism in its ranks, not to mention the bigotry that Kirk himself has shown.

    But there was a study done of interactivity of people with TPUSA social media accounts, and the majority was older, white males. It's not about appealing to the youth, imo. It's about the illusion of appealing to the youth to make the older consumers of TPUSA social media to see something more than is actually there.

    They are trying to build a presence, and have been successful, and by enlisting older media pushers getting exposure to younger eyes.

    Can't fault them for the strategy, because it's seen a pretty solid return.

    The problem is the further they drift to the right, the more they have to 'lose' if there's a crash and burn in the Fall - so it's a gamble.

    It's also interesting to watch them cry about "identity politics" and "virtue signalling" and "victimization" and "grievance culture" when they are doing the exact same thing. It's not about the principles - it's about the partisanship and getting those precious likes and views and re-tweets
     
    IMO, From a free market standpoint, democracy is an enemy. Free market doesn’t mean equal opportunity market - quite the contrary. It simply means the government isn’t going to put rules on how you run your business. Oh they might make you follow some guidelines when it comes to pollutants, or EEOC but you are going to exploit every loophole, exception or variance you can muscle out of your local authority - like allowing your eeoc numbers to be derived form a corp’s entire global footprint but only comparing it to FT non-exempt.

    Corporations will never make a decision based on society’s wellbeing. EVER. If one of their operations can tangentially help (see not hurt them) they will promote the living hell out of it as community involvement. I know because I have done it.

    Media corporations manufacture information. Their product has a shelf life of less than 24 hours from production before it expires and must be replaced with new inventory. Their distribution plan is an on-demand basis (just-in-time or KANBAN manufacturing for the industry heads) but the product needs to be available always, which means storing and maintaining obsolete inventory too. Transportation and logistics through wholesaling (local cable) are increasingly more of an issue as there has been a flood to the market with super cheap product (YouTube, etc). Conventional media has been mortally threatened like never before. Just like any other threatened organism, survival becomes its primary objective.

    Facebook, Fox, OAN, Breitbart, etc allowing or pushing of biased and manipulative reporting, are only doing what they do to survive; or face the wrath of their faceless shareholders.

    Pushing narratives, Creating division, promoting fear and generally scaring the hell out of people is tapping into primal emotion and that draws users. However, its no different than McDonald’s injecting their fries with beef marrow and sodium sulfate to make you subconsciously want more.

    I am in the weeds here but I guess my point is these media groups are terrible and are responsible for the unraveling of our democracy. They are, however, only giving us what we want- whether we want to admit it or not. They are only feeding the monkey.

    Until there is some meaningful legislation in and around information commerce -tv, web based ,etc, then there won’t be any reconciliation or change. They will only dig in deeper, to hold the demos that they have. Peddling in emotion, it seems, is the only way for them to ensure their users continue to consume their product.

    As far as I know there are only two ways to ensure they consume your product : have an unquestionably superior quality product, or get your users addicted. i won’t make any conclusions on which I think they are trying to accomplish, because I haven’t been in their Board Room or read their business model, but I could guess.
     
    Whether I agreed with the content of the flagged posts by Trump or not, I immediately felt like Twitter had messed up. When they began to make value judgments on the truthfulness of posts, they opened a Pandora's box of potential challenges to their policy. You make an excellent point about language, but it could also extend to many sets of opinions as well. If someone who is not an elected official states an opinion as fact, is Twitter going to flag that statement? Will they need to set up rapid response research teams to comb through millions of fact dependent claims? It's just my opinion, but capitulating to any group demanding that any particular person's posts be scrutinized more carefully is an invitation to more trouble than the company wants.
    I totally agree. It's not possible to fact check every post on Twitter and why would we want big tech companies to decide what is true and what isn't? It's one thing to remove threats of violence, clearly racists tweets, etc, but social media companies shouldn't tell us what we should believe and what we shouldn't. If they do then they should lose their immunity protections.
     
    I totally agree. It's not possible to fact check every post on Twitter and why would we want big tech companies to decide what is true and what isn't? It's one thing to remove threats of violence, clearly racists tweets, etc, but social media companies shouldn't tell us what we should believe and what we shouldn't. If they do then they should lose their immunity protections.

    Twitter isn't deciding what is or is not true. They are not telling you what you should and shouldn't believe.

    Fact checking provides sources that evaluate the claim and allow the reader to determine if those sources can be trusted.
     
    Twitter isn't deciding what is or is not true. They are not telling you what you should and shouldn't believe.

    Fact checking provides sources that evaluate the claim and allow the reader to determine if those sources can be trusted.
    If the fact checking is selective and arbitrary then they are giving the appearance that they believe something to be true and something else to be false. It also comes down to who is doing the fact checking and is the fact checking applied evenly and fairly. Have you seen any of Biden tweets fact checked? What about the some of the videos Biden posted on Twitter that were selectively edited? I wonder why those videos don't have the same notices that the videos were edited.
     
    If the fact checking is selective and arbitrary then they are giving the appearance that they believe something to be true and something else to be false. It also comes down to who is doing the fact checking and is the fact checking applied evenly and fairly. Have you seen any of Biden tweets fact checked? What about the some of the videos Biden posted on Twitter that were selectively edited? I wonder why those videos don't have the same notices that the videos were edited.

    like which one?
     
    If the fact checking is selective and arbitrary then they are giving the appearance that they believe something to be true and something else to be false. It also comes down to who is doing the fact checking and is the fact checking applied evenly and fairly. Have you seen any of Biden tweets fact checked? What about the some of the videos Biden posted on Twitter that were selectively edited? I wonder why those videos don't have the same notices that the videos were edited.

    Can you point to some of these videos and tweets that you think should be fact checked?
     

    Read the article and I'm not sure it's in the same league. There are Trump campaign commercials that have cut the video up of Biden in the same way. There was one that was posted a while back that cut up a meeting Biden had with Xi years ago.

    I mean, both are twisting and dishonest, but neither one of those is like the doctored CNN video in question. How is the commercial you're talking about here more like the CNN video that got the label and not like a Trump ad campaign that cuts up Biden's words?

    Seems we need to clarify that first before we can go on. You don't offer any explanation, just a "naked link" as it were
     
    Probably trying to not directly accuse them of having chosen a side. I think Facebook would rather be seen as letting it happen versus making it happen.
    Complacent doesn’t really follow grammatically from the rest of the sentence, though.

    “Negligent” holds a stronger connotation than “complacent,” so when they say “Not only was he negligent, but also...” (paraphrased) the implication is the word that follows will be even more damaging.

    Complicit fits that bill. Complacent does not.

    Further, in denotation, negligent and complacent are too similar for the sentence to make much sense anyway.

    Pretty sure it was a typo they’re now just going to roll with.

    Carry on.
     
    Don't know if this is real but it made me laugh

    D5A3B91C-A308-49AF-B30B-8ED6B6CA8B28.jpeg
     
    Read the article and I'm not sure it's in the same league.

    I mean, both are twisting and dishonest, but neither one of those is like the doctored CNN video in question. How is the commercial you're talking about here more like the CNN video that got the label and not like a Trump ad campaign that cuts up Biden's words?
    You say there are both twisting and dishonest yet you find a way to downplay the Biden video. I never compared Trump's video to Biden's video. Both are edited videos that were posted on Twitter. Trump's tweet got the manipulated video disclsimer and Biden's didn't. It's as simple as that.

    I do laugh at the people who are outraged at Trumps satirical video that made fun of CNN. It's like getting mad at an Onion article.

    Here's another one:


    We all know that Twitter won't put any disclaimers on Biden's tweets.
     
    You say there are both twisting and dishonest yet you find a way to downplay the Biden video. I never compared Trump's video to Biden's video. Both are edited videos that were posted on Twitter. Trump's tweet got the manipulated video disclsimer and Biden's didn't. It's as simple as that.

    I do laugh at the people who are outraged at Trumps satirical video that made fun of CNN. It's like getting mad at an Onion article.

    Here's another one:


    We all know that Twitter won't put any disclaimers on Biden's tweets.

    Have they put a disclaimer on any videos Trump has posted besides the one with the fake CNN chyron on it?
     
    Have they put a disclaimer on any videos Trump has posted besides the one with the fake CNN chyron on it?
    I'm not sure about other videos, but they "fact checked" two of his other Tweets. I don't have a problem if they want to start fact checking, but it won't be done evenly and fairly.

    Can you point out any Tweets by Biden or any other Democratic politicians that were fact checked by Twitter?
     
    You say there are both twisting and dishonest yet you find a way to downplay the Biden video. I never compared Trump's video to Biden's video. Both are edited videos that were posted on Twitter. Trump's tweet got the manipulated video disclsimer and Biden's didn't. It's as simple as that.

    I do laugh at the people who are outraged at Trumps satirical video that made fun of CNN. It's like getting mad at an Onion article.

    Here's another one:


    We all know that Twitter won't put any disclaimers on Biden's tweets.

    I’m saying the campaign ads both stayed up. I just saw the Biden China one - heavily edited as all ads are - and the one linked in the article.

    both of them are different than the one Taken down.

    I’m not downplaying anything. I’m trying to compare apples to apples. And this seems pretty exact to me.

    this is your point. It’s up to you to make it. Explain how the Biden commercial is more like the faked CNN copyrighted ad than the Trump campaign ad.

    your entire point hinges on this. Because if it just an edited campaign ad then it’s just like the Trump campaign ad. It would have to be demonstrably different and more like the CNN copyrighted video.

    your point so you need to demonstrate.

    I’m talking about three videos. You seem to think I am talking about two.

    that is incorrect.

    the CNN copyrighted video is not the Trump campaign ad I am talking about. So you should probably make sure you’re dealing with everything I outlined before responding
     

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