[HN Gopher] Florida, in a first, will fine social media companie...
___________________________________________________________________
Florida, in a first, will fine social media companies that bar
candidates
Author : tareqak
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-05-24 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| N1H1L wrote:
| If a politician's hobby is shouting fire in crowded, dark
| theaters and a theater chain bans the said politician from their
| property - whose fault is it?
| saurik wrote:
| I am not saying this is the answer, but I want to throw out an
| option that I am not sure is being considered: "the people who
| voted for them"?
| tolbish wrote:
| > A late amendment to the bill exempts companies from the law if
| they own a theme park or an entertainment venue larger than 25
| acres.
|
| Opening soon: Zuckerland. Jokes aside, this seems profoundly
| corrupt.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Having done a fair amount of business/commercial real-estate in
| Florida, I can tell you first-hand that Florida is probably the
| most fraud-friendly state in the Nation.
| gaspard234 wrote:
| Florida senator Rick Scott was one of the largest fraudsters
| in the state.
| zibzab wrote:
| Oh, my naive friend!
|
| Of course that have already thought about that. Note that the
| theme park must have a certain revenue to qualify.
| kelnos wrote:
| Is this even enforceable? Do Facebook, Twitter, etc. have any
| legal entities in Florida? If they do, would it be a big deal to
| dissolve them? Can a state still fine a company that has no legal
| presence in their state and force the company to pay?
|
| Could this even escalate to FB/Twitter banning all _users_ from
| Florida? That would be a delightful twist. (Ok, sure, I know, it
| wouldn 't go that far.)
| DeonPenny wrote:
| That would just entice other states especially states who side
| is being banned to enforce it too. I couldn't imagine this
| going over well.
| Tehchops wrote:
| Always love seeing the party of "small government" push
| legislation like this.
|
| Of course, everyone knows "Small Government" has a trailing
| caveat of "...for me, but not for thee"
| JI00912 wrote:
| Good! The west doesn't need to get any closer to being a
| corporatocracy.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| So you're going to hand that power over to politicians instead?
| What a fantastic way to make everything worse.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Politicians are bound by literal centuries of free speech
| tradition and precedent. I trust them much more than I trust
| activists in Bay Area meeting rooms who believe that a
| company's mission should be promoting a worldview they got
| from Tumblr and Twitter.
| luke2m wrote:
| That's like saying you will be fined if you don't allow
| politicians into your house.
| suifbwish wrote:
| While that would probably suck, the troll in me would find this
| hilarious.
| SigmundA wrote:
| Gotta love the Disney carve out in the bill, ok for them to do
| it.
| charwalker wrote:
| Freedom of association is an expensive thing to get sued over.
| Hopefully the state is ready to blow taxpayer dollars on the
| inevitable loss trying to defend this.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Would love to amend the constitution to not allow censorship of
| speech by private companies. If it's hate speech, etc. then
| obviously yes but otherwise censorship is toxic.
|
| No private companies should be deciding the public discourse and
| unfortunately the most common forms of communication in today's
| age are all routed through private entities.
| Caprinicus wrote:
| Hate speech does not have a definition in the US, and barely
| has a definition in countries where it is banned. I am sure
| almost everyone who has ever been banned for political reasons
| has had hate speech given as the official cause.
| binaryblitz wrote:
| Who decides what is and isn't hate speech?
| charwalker wrote:
| So, like, the same type of hate speech Trump spouted all over
| Twitter before his ban?
| w0de0 wrote:
| Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is
| precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech.
| It is the government being allowed to control discourse even
| among private citizens on private property; the steps from such
| a law to a society in which the truth is only what the
| government says it is are few.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is
| precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech
|
| Nonsense. That's like saying that common carrier regulation
| [1] (e.g. requiring that railroads take all customers) is the
| same thing as the state imprisoning people without cause.
| It's the total opposite.
|
| The state can, must, and will apply common carrier
| regulations to modern communication infrastructure like
| internet infrastructure and social media. That's not even
| close to state-mandated censorship.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
| w0de0 wrote:
| Ok. Let's talk it through.
|
| Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your
| property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and
| no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the
| railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and
| presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.
|
| Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the
| platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave
| a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every
| other platform is homogeneously bound by government
| regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.
|
| The government is now in the business, by virtue of
| requiring no private censorship, of defining what
| "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment
| becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument
| that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally
| 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a
| majority to start banning such speech on all private
| companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are
| using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media
| is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the
| time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak -
| it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the
| government! Controlled by my party!
|
| To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending
| an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same
| as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a
| railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy
| to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires
| for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running
| a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown
| packets of information.
|
| When information so carried by a common carrier is composed
| to make complex political speech on privately-held
| platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of
| property which exist to make a profit, the government
| should back off. The platform is itself an expression of
| free speech and free enterprise - it is not common
| property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter
| lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.
|
| To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government
| defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the
| passengers of the railway.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The one political faction deciding anything the other
| side says is hate speech has already happened. Okay, so
| the censored party decided to leave the censoring
| platforms because they don't like what they're doing. Oh
| wait, the most major alternative social platform is shut
| down by their hosting provider and the two App Store
| providers with monopolies and the providers claim it's a
| hate speech service. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter,
| Amazon, etc. use their monopolistic market positioning
| and financial leverage to crush any and all competition
| and that's where we are today.
| orf wrote:
| Because the core problem with right wing, anti-censorship
| sites is they turn into repugnant shitholes the moment
| they get traction. Because it also turns out that there
| is a _large_ overlap between people who cry about cancel
| culture and people who have strong opinions about Jews,
| the Holocaust, the Nazi party, Democrats, "liberals",
| transsexuals, gays and whatever other Republican Party
| talking point is flavor of the month.
|
| You can spend 5 minutes on those sites to verify the
| claim that it's full of hate speech.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > but, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably
| illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.
|
| Why do you think it's a given that anti-censorship
| common-carrier regulation would have an exception for
| "hate speech"? There's no constitutional precedent for
| that. There are specific categories of speech that the
| government may restriction --- slander and obscenity, for
| example --- and so-called "hate speech" isn't on the
| list. The United States has a _very_ strong protections
| for free speech, even speech that offends people. Social
| media can, will, and must be legally required to carry
| everyone 's speech, even when that speech is offensive.
|
| Social media is _exactly_ like a railroad. It 's
| infrastructure marketed to the general public as an
| important part of participating in society. Unelected and
| unaccountable individuals in Bay Area meeting rooms do
| not get to unilaterally decide how the rest of the world
| may speak.
| charwalker wrote:
| The first amendment also respects the right to freedom of
| association. This law is akin to the government forcing
| you to do business with someone you would rather avoid,
| for example to make a cake for a gay wedding that goes
| against your personal religion.
|
| Do you see the breakdown here? The government cannot
| force private parties to associate with anyone like this,
| especially a controversial political figure.
|
| You seem to misunderstand the basic sense of the first
| amendment.
|
| https://www.mtsu.edu/first-
| amendment/article/1594/freedom-of...
| zackees wrote:
| Nonsense, you can't refuse service to people who are gay
| or muslim. This political affiliation is being carved out
| as some exception. This is the antithesis of the non
| discrimination the US has established itself as
| culturally. Suddenly the left is coming out with this
| segregationist/apartide/cancel culture edict. I'm sorry
| but we had this era of civil rights where we rejected
| discrimination in businesses.
| saurik wrote:
| > This law is akin to the government forcing you to do
| business with someone you would rather avoid, for example
| to make a cake for a gay wedding that goes against your
| personal religion.
|
| But, the government does do that... specifically that ;P.
| The baker won a single narrow verdict on exactly their
| facts, but the Supreme Court refused to say anything
| about anything else and AFAIK most courts are on the "you
| must not discriminate" side.
| w0de0 wrote:
| Because the railroad can't be used to turn my favorite
| social media into the haven of trolls, fools, and
| reactionaries. If you accept all speech without any
| boundaries - ie, with no defined "hate speech," the
| internet will swiftly become the domain of the loudest
| haters.
|
| Your arguments apply to Twitter banning Trump - but they
| also apply to dang banning a poster who trolls everyone.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| This is not possible without a constitutional amendment.
|
| Also, the idea of giving politicians control over what speech
| must be carried on social media strikes me as stark raving mad.
| There is _no_ chance that won't be abused.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Yeah I think we're on the same page, no one should be able to
| censor speech that isn't hate speech is really the main
| point. And definitely no jurisdiction should be given to
| politicians.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You're proposing giving jurisdiction to politicians, you
| just don't seem to be aware of it. Someone, somewhere will
| need to decide what speech is and is not "censorable" (a
| gross abuse of that word) above and beyond the regular
| standard of "protected speech". Basically nobody wants to
| live on an internet where Twitter cannot moderate some
| protected speech , as that's how you end up with 4chan.
| Hate speech is protected speech, pornography is protected
| speech, as is all kinds of harassment and bullying. Someone
| will need to draw the line for what can and cannot be
| moderated on all platforms, and that is a huge amount of
| power to hand out.
|
| It's also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do
| this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that
| forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for
| speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for
| anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The
| courts will strike this bill down, it's pure political
| theater for the base.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I think 4chan is the perfect example of a site filled
| with lots of hate speech. There are well-established
| legal precedents for what hate speech is already. There
| would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a
| person's rights are violated they would be able to sue
| the company and a court would decide if they were
| censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not.
| It would have to be done at the federal level one way or
| another due to Section 230 precluding state laws. If
| anything, Section 230 is too loosely defined right now:
|
| "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict
| access to or availability of material that the provider
| or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious,
| filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise
| objectionable, whether or not such material is
| constitutionally protected"
|
| The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank
| check to censor anything.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > There are well-established legal precedents for what
| hate speech is already.
|
| [Citation Needed]
|
| > There would not be enforcers of this on each website
| but if a person's rights are violated they would be able
| to sue the company and a court would decide if they were
| censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not.
|
| Creating a legal cause of action is a fantastic way to
| create a chilling effect without getting your hands
| dirty. This is a pretty common trick lawmakers use to try
| and backdoor introduce rules they can't legally enforce
| themselves.
|
| Also, the courts consider themselves to be constrained by
| the first amendment. You can't endrun around that
| amendment by using the judiciary, which is why Times v.
| Sullivan was decided the way it was, even though that was
| a civil action between private parties.
|
| > It would have to be done at the federal level one way
| or another
|
| Doing it at the federal level is not sufficient if the
| courts believe that the law is unconstitutional.
|
| > The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank
| check to censor anything.
|
| Again, this is not censorship. You are grossly abusing
| that word. The moment you face legal consequences for
| speech, we can talk about censorship. The word you're
| looking for is "moderation".
|
| Second, you're tap dancing around a really big problem.
| It's fine and dandy to point at 230 and say "it's too
| vague", but arguing against something is easy. You need
| to propose a clear alternative standard that will stand
| up to judicial scrutiny. You have not done that.
| charwalker wrote:
| You should read up on the tolerance paradox. The people
| behind this FL bill are the type to abuse such tolerance,
| all while telling bakeries it's chill if they refuse
| services for gay wedding or similar.
| suifbwish wrote:
| No. "Hate speech" is a vague BS term that can be applied to
| anything that disagrees with any established political
| group. I would rejoin the military to fight in a war that
| keeps "Hate speech" out of the US law books. The first
| amendment shall not be infringed on even if whatever being
| said is the most hateful diabolical thing imaginable.
| Absolutely no exceptions.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-24 23:03 UTC)