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[NCAC] PRIVATE CENSORSHIP – FIGHTING SUPPRESSION OF SPEECH BY NON-GOVERNMENTAL ACTORS

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Mar 8, 2021.

  1. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    @NewRoxFan

    Twitter Flags Foreign Policy Expert Tweeting Criticism Of China

    https://jonathanturley.org/2021/07/08/twitter-flags-foreign-policy-expert-tweeting-criticism-china/

    22 minutes ago
    Twitter Flags Foreign Policy Expert Tweeting Criticism Of China
    by jonathanturley

    We have previously discussed Twitter’s robust censorship program that repeatedly has been denounced for bias in taking sides on scientific, social, and political controversies. The problem is that, when you have an army of censors with their thumbs on buttons to flag or bar comments, the tendency is ever expanding levels of censorship. Indeed, much censorship is not thumbless through automatic systems to remove certain comments. That was evident this week. Not only did Twitter flag a picture of a veteran wishing the country a Happy Fourth of July (presumably due to his combat scars) but it flagged New Zealand foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Brady who mocked the Chinese government. The incident is particularly notable after Twitter recently admitted to censoring criticism of India’s government.

    Brady is a professor at the University of Canterbury and an authority on the Chinese regime. Like many, Brady mocked the recent Communist Party’s over-the-top celebration of Chinese President Xi Jinping. She soon found that some of her tweets were “unavailable,” Twitter’s version of being “disappeared.”

    What happened next is all-too-familiar: nothing. Brady tried to get someone to respond to the censorship and received no answer. Indeed, Twitter makes it extraordinarily difficult to reach anyone on such issues. While professing commitment to transparency, the company is notorious for being unresponsive and closed to criticism, even efforts to learn why actions have been taken on such tweets. It was only after Edward Lucas, a journalist for the Times of Britain, inquired that the company finally responded to him rather than Brady. Her account was then restored without an apology or acknowledgement. Brady dryly noted “Seems like @Twitter may have briefly forgotten they don’t work for Xi Jinping.”

    The assumption is that this is the work of Chinese agents who submit a torrent of complaints to trigger a flagging. Various groups have used the same technique to cancel opposing views. Twitter does nothing about it. Rather than have a presumption in favor of free speech, it automatically flags material pending proof that it is worthy of publication. That often means that it does not disagree with Twitter’s own view of certain sensitive subjects. Absent media coverage, the Chinese would likely have succeeded in silencing Brady with the help of Twitter.

    As discussed earlier, members of Congress are now pushing for public and private censorship on the internet and in other forums. They are being joined by an unprecedented alliance of academics, writers and activists calling for everything from censorship to incarceration to blacklists. For example, an article published in The Atlantic by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods called for Chinese-style censorship of the internet, stating that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

    Much of the effort by politicians and activists has been directed at using Big Tech to censor or bar opposing viewpoints, seeking to achieve indirectly what cannot be achieved directly in curtailing free speech. Congress could never engage in this type of raw content discrimination between news organizations under the First Amendment.

    However, it can use its influence on private companies to limit free speech. The move makes obvious sense if the desire is to shape and control opinion — the essence of state-controlled media. Controlling speech on certain platforms is meaningless if citizens can still hear opposing views from other sources. You must not only control the narrative but also eliminate alternatives to it.


     
  2. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    Sorry how is flagging sensitive content as potentially sensitive censorship?

    This feels like someone is searching to create controversy out of nothing.
     
  3. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    Also the right needs to answer the inconsistency in its platform.

    How can it support Hobby Lobby's freedom to control what kind of health benefits its employees receive, or whether a bakery can reject gay couples for moral reasons, but not allow tech companies to govern the type of content posted on its platform?

    If Twitter decided to censor content promoting abortions, somehow I don't think the right would take issue at all with that. And therein lies the problem with this argument. It only applies to conservative causes and does so in a way that is contradictory to other major arguments they are making.
     
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  4. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    Editorial page editor of the Washington Post writes:

    "Opinion: Legally, Trump’s tech lawsuit is a joke. But it raises a serious question."

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...bc2dfa-e010-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html

    Opinion: Legally, Trump’s tech lawsuit is a joke. But it raises a serious question.

    Opinion by Fred Hiatt
    Editorial page editor
    July 8, 2021|Updated yesterday at 6:23 p.m. EDT

    Former president Donald Trump’s lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been rightly derided as wrong on the facts, preposterous on the law and doomed to be thrown out of court.

    Which is all true — except that many people will not find Trump’s complaints, in this case, all that unreasonable.

    It just doesn’t feel right, in other words, that company CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai get to decide which politicians Americans can hear and which ones we can’t. Everyone mocking Trump’s misreading of the First Amendment would be foolish to dismiss that feeling.

    Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube) barred Trump from their platforms after he incited violence on Jan. 6. They are private companies, and they had every right to do so. They may (and most people would agree, should) ban child p*rnography, racist appeals or, yes, calls to violence.

    Trump’s first response to being blackballed was to bluster about how he didn’t need those platforms, anyway. He would create his own, and make a fortune in the process. He would start a blog. His fans would find him.

    Not much has come of those boasts. Trump abandoned his lightly read blog after 29 days. Now he is suing to get back onto the mainstream platforms, claiming they are violating his First Amendment rights.

    Of course, the First Amendment bars the government from infringing on speech. It doesn’t require The Post, say, to publish an op-ed that we don’t want to publish.

    Trump’s lawsuits purport to get around this little problem by claiming that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are “state actors.” Which is, as experts told The Post, a “crackpot theory” and a “complete misinterpretation” of law.

    But the fact that Trump failed so miserably to find alternatives to these platforms reinforces the common-sense feeling that they are not ordinary private businesses. Most people understand that they are private companies but also that, in today’s America, if those three are silencing you, you are being excluded in a serious way from the public square.

    And many understandably wonder: Why should they get to make that call?

    Trump’s lawsuits certainly don’t point the way to an answer. Critics are right to note his history of filing meritless suits, for publicity or intimidation, and to suggest that the fate of these will be no different — though they undoubtedly will provide a valuable fundraising tool for him along the way.

    Critics are also correct that Trump’s claims to class-action status are as far-fetched as his constitutional argument. Their very loud complaining notwithstanding, conservatives are not barred from these platforms. What the platforms have tried to limit, belatedly in the view of many critics from the other side, are calls to violence and lies — about election fraud, vaccine dangers and other subjects.

    Yet that brings us back to the hard question: Do we want Facebook CEO Zuckerberg making those judgments?

    His own answer has been no: Facebook has called for government regulation, so that rules about speech in the digital world would be given some level of democratic legitimacy. In the meantime, he also has directed Facebook to behave a bit more like a state actor, creating a kind of internal “supreme court” that can evaluate the company’s decisions on speech and, in some cases, overrule them.

    In another era, when broadcast networks dominated public debate in ways arguably comparable to the platforms’ presence today, the government did regulate. A fairness doctrine required networks to cover important public controversies and give opposing sides equal time when they did so.

    Would it be possible to re-create such regulation today? Which platforms would we include? Who would decide what’s fair? Given today’s partisanship, do we really think the government could devise and enforce rules in ways that most Americans would accept as even-handed?

    Having just survived four years of a president determined to twist the powers of government to serve his own interests and illegally perpetuate his rule, I would think twice, and twice more, before putting the Justice Department or the Federal Communications Commission in charge.

    Alternatively, you might try to break up the platforms or limit their size. But then we might just find ourselves further atomized into our political tribes.

    At a minimum, the seductiveness of the unfairness complaint should serve as a cautionary note to those people, myself included, who have criticized the platforms for not moving more quickly, in this country and others, to ban dangerous speech.

    I still think they have an obligation to do so at times. But they are not wrong to fear the cost of any apparent high-handedness. Trump has no legal case. Underneath all his lies and self-pity, though, he may have a point.

    Opinion by Fred Hiatt
    Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post. He writes editorials for the newspaper and a biweekly column that appears on Mondays. Previously he was a local reporter in Virginia, a national reporter covering national security and a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo and Moscow.

     
  5. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    "Donald J. Trump: Why I’m Suing Big Tech":

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-j-trump-why-im-suing-big-tech-11625761897?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

    Donald J. Trump: Why I’m Suing Big Tech
    If Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can censor me, they can censor you—and believe me, they are.

    By Donald J. Trump
    July 8, 2021 12:31 pm ET

    One of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of Big Tech corporations that have teamed up with government to censor the free speech of the American people. This is not only wrong—it is unconstitutional. To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing Big Tech to stop it.

    Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media—banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.

    No longer are Big Tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence. They are manipulating and controlling the political debate itself. Consider content that was censored in the past year. Big Tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true. In the middle of a pandemic, Big Tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of Covid-19. In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post—America’s oldest newspaper—for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden’s family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.

    Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social-media accounts of the sitting president. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you—and believe me, they are.

    Jennifer Horton, a Michigan schoolteacher, was banned from Facebook for sharing an article questioning whether mandatory masks for young children are healthy. Later, when her brother went missing, she was unable to use Facebook to get the word out. Colorado physician Kelly Victory was deplatformed by YouTube after she made a video for her church explaining how to hold services safely. Kiyan Michael of Florida and her husband, Bobby, lost their 21-year-old son in a fatal collision caused by a twice-deported illegal alien. Facebook censored them after they posted on border security and immigration enforcement.

    Meanwhile, Chinese propagandists and the Iranian dictator spew threats and hateful lies on these platforms with impunity.

    This flagrant attack on free speech is doing terrible damage to our country. That is why in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I filed class-action lawsuits to force Big Tech to stop censoring the American people. The suits seek damages to deter such behavior in the future and injunctions restoring my accounts.

    Our lawsuits argue that Big Tech companies are being used to impose illegal and unconstitutional government censorship. In 1996 Congress sought to promote the growth of the internet by extending liability protections to internet platforms, recognizing that they were exactly that—platforms, not publishers. Unlike publishers, companies such as Facebook and Twitter can’t be held legally liable for the content posted to their sites. Without this immunity, social media companies could not exist.

    Democrats in Congress are exploiting this leverage to coerce platforms into censoring their political opponents. In recent years, we have all watched Congress haul Big Tech CEOs before their committees and demand that they censor “false” stories and “disinformation”—labels determined by an army of partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democrat Party. As the cases of fellow plaintiffs Ms. Horton, Dr. Victory and the Michael family demonstrate, in practice this amounts to suppression of speech that those in power do not like.

    Further, Big Tech and government agencies are actively coordinating to remove content from the platforms according to the guidance of agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Big Tech and traditional media entities formed the Trusted News Initiative, which essentially takes instructions from the CDC about what information they need to “combat.” The tech companies are doing the government’s bidding, colluding to censor unapproved ideas.

    This coercion and coordination is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held that Congress can’t use private actors to achieve what the Constitution prohibits it from doing itself. In effect, Big Tech has been illegally deputized as the censorship arm of the U.S. government. This should alarm you no matter your political persuasion. It is unacceptable, unlawful and un-American.

    Through these lawsuits, I intend to restore free speech for all Americans—Democrats, Republicans and independents. I will never stop fighting to defend the constitutional rights and sacred liberties of the American people.

    Mr. Trump was the 45th president of the United States.
     
  6. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    "Trump Can Win His Case Against Tech Giants":

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-...nst-tech-giants-11626025357?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

    Trump Can Win His Case Against Tech Giants
    The companies censor on the government’s behalf. There’s ample precedent for calling it state action.
    By Vivek Ramaswamy
    July 11, 2021 1:42 pm ET

    The media has panned Donald Trump’s First Amendment lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube: “sure to fail,” “as stupid as you’d think,” “ridiculous.” Mr. Trump’s complaint omits important precedents, facts and claims for relief, but there’s a strong case to be made that social-media censorship violates the Constitution. If his lawyers do better in court than in their initial filing, Mr. Trump can win.

    It’s true that the First Amendment ordinarily applies to the government rather than private companies. But the central claim in Mr. Trump’s class-action lawsuit—that the defendants should be treated as state actors and are bound by the First Amendment when they engage in selective political censorship—has precedent to back it up. Their censorship constitutes state action because the government granted them immunity from legal liability, threatened to punish them if they allow disfavored speech, and colluded with them in choosing targets for censorship.

    The Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973) that the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” As Jed Rubenfeld and I argued in these pages in January, that’s what Congress did by passing Section 230(c)(2) of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech and immunizes them from state liability if they do so.

    The high court has repeatedly held that federal immunity pre-empting state law can transform a private party’s conduct into state action subject to constitutional scrutiny. In Railway Employees’ Department v. Hanson (1956), the justices found state action in union-employer agreements because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law. In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association (1989), the court again found state action in a private company’s conduct because federal laws immunized companies from liability if they tested employees for drugs.

    Prominent congressional Democrats have also issued severe, explicit and repeated threats to retaliate against social-media giants if they fail to remove “hate speech” and “misinformation” that the government can’t directly censor under the Constitution. These threats have worked.

    In an October 2020 hearing, as Mr. Trump’s lawsuits note, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told CEOs Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook: “The president has used this microphone to spread vicious falsehoods and apparent attempt to overturn the will of the voters.” In the same hearing, he threatened “a breakup of the tech giants” and “Section 230 reform,” including “possible repeal.” Mr. Zuckerberg has called such regulations an “existential threat” to Facebook. In January both sites banned Mr. Trump.

    The Supreme Court held in Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963) that the First Amendment was violated when a private bookstore stopped selling works after officials deemed them “objectionable” and threatened prosecution. In Carlin Communications v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co. (1987), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that a telephone company was acting as a state agent when it acceded to government threats to stop carrying offensive content on paid dial-in lines.

    Even if Messrs. Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn’t fear these government threats, the Second Circuit held in Hammerhead Enterprises v. Brezenoff (1983) that if government officials’ comments “can be reasonably interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request,” that’s enough to constitute state action. The Ninth Circuit has held that it doesn’t matter if the threats were the “real motivating force” behind the private party’s conduct.

    A growing body of evidence suggests that social media companies have voluntarily worked with Democratic officials to censor content the latter disfavor. In Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (2001), the high court held that state action exists if the private party’s conduct results from “significant encouragement, either overt or covert,” or if the private party is a “willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents.”

    According to allegations in other pending lawsuits, Twitter formed “trusted partner” relationships with state officials to remove content identified by the officials as election misinformation—when in reality the content was simply critical of state policies.

    In September 2020 Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook “works with” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove Covid-related content. The company’s official policy states that it is “advised” by public-health authorities about what Covid content should be blocked. For months, while officials including Anthony Fauci proclaimed that the Wuhan lab-leak theory was “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory,” Facebook blocked any mention of that theory as “misinformation.”

    But after Dr. Fauci and the administration retreated from this position, Facebook almost immediately lifted its ban. Recently published email exchanges between Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Fauci reveal no evidence of direct instruction from the government on this point but make a case for Facebook’s willful participation in a joint activity with the government.

    Mr. Trump’s lawsuits don’t go as far as they could have in establishing a pattern of willful participation, but their discovery phase will almost surely reveal additional examples. Social-media companies are privately owned, but when they collude with officials to block disfavored content, they are serving as the government’s censorship bureau and must answer to the First Amendment.

    Mr. Trump has another path to legal victory even if he loses on the state-action claim. State legislatures, most recently in Florida, have begun to impose nondiscrimination and common-carrier requirements on Big Tech platforms. Opponents say these laws violate the companies’ First Amendment rights. But if so, how could similar nondiscrimination laws have been imposed for decades on telephone companies? Opponents also say these laws are pre-empted by Section 230. But as Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his concurrence in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute, Section 230 is arguably unconstitutional if interpreted to pre-empt state laws against viewpoint discrimination. Mr. Trump failed to assert this claim under Florida law, though he could amend his complaint before trial to do so.

    Mr. Trump’s critics are mistaken to think the claims he raises are completely novel. But the case is unprecedented in another way—the staggering scale of Big Tech’s power to restrict speech. No company in U.S. history has so comprehensively silenced elected officials or prevented them from communicating with citizens. Worse, they did so at the behest of, and in careful coordination with, government leaders in the ascendant opposition party as it gained power.

    In 1924 Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover warned against the concentration of corporate power in the radio industry: “We cannot allow any single person or group to place themselves in a position where they can censor the material which shall be broadcasted to the public.” Almost a century later, the danger he foretold has been realized. Mr. Trump’s case provides an opportunity to address it.

    Mr. Ramaswamy is author of “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.”






     
  7. London'sBurning

    London'sBurning Contributing Member

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  8. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  9. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  10. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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  11. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    What are your thoughts on Trump wanting DoJ to indict SNL producers?
     
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  12. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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    Prove it.
     
  13. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...artment-to-stop-snl-from-teasing-him?ref=home

    We have White House staffers confirming it and then we have it straight from the horse's mouth with Trump's tweet a while back asking if SNL can legally make fun of him this often and whether the FCC can remove NBC's "media license".

    "Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this? There must be Collusion with the Democrats and, of course, Russia! Such one sided media coverage, most of it Fake News. Hard to believe I won and am winning. Approval Rating 52%, 93% with Republicans. Sorry! #MAGA"

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019

    His account is suspended so I can't link the direct tweet. I'm sure you know the mods banned him on Twitter.
     
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  14. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    [​IMG]
     
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  15. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    That's fake news buddy.
     
  16. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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    If that is the best you have, then your previous post is flatly false. Wondering publicly in a Tweet whether the FEC or FCC should 'look into this' obviously has nothing to do with recommending or wanting indictments by the DOJ. Also, NBC does not have a "media license," as there is no such thing. As a result, it cannot be removed, so you have nothing to fear on that front. This was obviously a politically oriented P.R. stunt by President Trump, and nothing more.
     
  17. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    yeah but what about Trump
     
  18. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    I don't think Trump knows this also. Hence why he asks rhetorically? Or sincerely whether a comedy sketch show should be looked over by the FCC for what exactly?

    Why should the FCC look at SNL?

    I don't think you would tolerate a Biden or Obama presidency tweeting about whether the FCC should look at the Greg Gutfeld shoe because they don't find his jokes about their administration funny.
     
  19. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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    What is that compared to the current regime openly admitting that they are providing Facebook with censorship instructions targeted at speech that dares to not comply with the propaganda narrative that they are promoting? And Obama did complain about Fox News daring to criticize him on a number of occasions.
     

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