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from the what-were-you-saying-about-Free-Speech? dept.
It would give these bureaucratic government agencies unprecedented control over how Internet platforms moderate speech by allowing them to revoke the essential protections Congress laid out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). CDA 230 is the basic law that makes it possible for online platforms to let users post our own content, and to make basic decisions about what types of content they as private entities want to host. Every meme, every social media post, every blog and user-created video on the Internet has been made possible by this crucial free speech protection.
In practice, this executive order would mean that whichever political party is in power could dictate what speech is allowed on the Internet. If the government doesn't like the way a private company is moderating content, they can shut their entire website down.
From https://www.salon.com/2019/08/12/leaked-draft-of-trump-executive-order-deemed-unconstitutional_partner/ we get the following:
According to CNN, which obtained a copy of the draft, the new rule "calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms. Although still in its early stages and subject to change, the Trump administration's draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies."
While Politico was the first to report how the draft was being circulated by the White House, CNN notes that if put into effect, "the order would reflect a significant escalation by President Trump in his frequent attacks against social media companies over an alleged but unproven systemic bias against conservatives by technology platforms. And it could lead to a significant reinterpretation of a law that, its authors have insisted, was meant to give tech companies broad freedom to handle content as they see fit."
"[...] It's hard to put into words how mind bogglingly absurd this executive order is," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, in a tweet. "In the name of defending free speech it would allow mass government censorship of online content. In practice, it means whichever party is in power can decide what speech is allowed on the internet."
This authoritarian legislation is being pushed by claiming it will do the opposite of censorship by giving the federal government even more broad power. Reminds me of the following quote, "I like taking guns away early," Trump said. "Take the guns first, go through due process second."
See also:
- https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/leaked-draft-of-trump-executive-order-to-censor-the-internet-denounced-as-dangerous-unconstitutional-edict/
- https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/08/13/the-trump-administration-drafted-an-executive-order-to-censor-the-internet/
- http://dctribune.org/trumps-executive-order-to-censor-the-internet-leaked-could-allow-mass-government-censorship/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20669477
(Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:17PM (35 children)
We are attempting to. But it is becoming clear that isn't going to work. If we have to build our own Internet from the last mile up, build our own banks, build our own cities, build our own police, it is quicker to build our own government.
Look at last week. It is now proven the latest "manifesto" didn't get posted to 8chan first. But that wouldn't matter anyway, ignore that for now. They got yanked by CloudFlare. Epik instantly took them in, that is what Alt-Tech is for, we are "building our own." And THEY got their upstream Internet yanked by two different upstream providers they had iron clad SLAs with within hours because the NEW YORK TIMES was directly demanding it and applying political pressure. So 8chan is currently dark. If we are now forbidden the benefit of contract law, we are going to need to build a new government, and right here in our homeland is as good a place as any to build one. You are going to have to find somewhere else to afflict.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:30PM (8 children)
Yes, we do need a "new" internet, with bulletproof service provision that can't be taken down or interfered with in any way.. Mesh? Ad hoc? Distributed? This is how we are supposed to *route around the damage* and end the all the stupid arguing about censorship.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:38PM (1 child)
Exactly, this will be solved technologically not politically. Like pretty much every problem ever.
Something entirely new will take over and the lazy corrupt people who mess everything up won't understand it until 30 years later. Then the cycle renews. Perhaps cheap satellites are the key.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:32PM
Eggsactly! Just like how Uber has solved transportation!
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:39PM
Going to be very had to do. None of the current attempts are anywhere close to good enough. They are all just LARPs to allow the powers that be to "avert their gaze" while stuff they don't really mind goes on. The Last Mile problem is going to be the killer one, government monopolies.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:27PM (4 children)
A new internet won't fix that. The current internet *already* has those features. But that doesn't mean jack when everyone insists on only visiting 5 different sites for everything.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:21PM (2 children)
The current internet *already* has those features.
Not while you are tethered to a service provider. Client/server will never be P2P.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday August 15 2019, @09:12PM (1 child)
What you want is not possible for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that you would need to have people agree on the protocols to use.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 15 2019, @09:32PM
You should only have to worry about that at the end points. The switching should be transparent and agnostic, and just pass the bits.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @06:23AM
The only cost effective way to build a distributed replacement for the internet is wifi and thanks to the FCC, we have limited spectrum and legal transmission power to reach the next hop with. Running a full mesh with wifi following legal guidelines, including certified directional antennas would require so many hops to get from one end of the US to the other that it would take multiple to dozens of seconds of latency to reach the other side. And they still have legal jurisdiction to censor it. Unless you want to risk RICO violations and illegally run an overpowered wifi meshnet that is 'dark', but at that point you may as well be fighting for autonomy and self-governance anyway.
No, at this point in time we need to have a long hard discussion about a constitutional convention, and if the union really wants to be a single union, or a series of unions better aligned with the values of their constituencies. Because America division of lines may have changed, but they are still there and the two teams are not going to get along better in 10 years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:17PM (11 children)
So are you one of the people that think mass killings are morally justifiable? You can't hide behind political abstractions when people are literally dying.
But hey, if you want to post a manifesto glorifying literal terrorism and it gets taken down, take your provider to court. You say "they had iron clad SLAs". Take it to court.
You won't, and I'll tell you why: you're scared of the FBI. Not for the manifesto, unless you're lying about your belief that it's legally protected free speech. But because you're engaged in politically-motivated violence and organizing for violence.
In other words, you are a terrorist. "It is quicker to build our own government". That's what ISIS did because Al Qaeda couldn't affect the kind of change they wanted.
I'd love to debate corporate censorship with you when you can come up with an example that doesn't fall apart under the weight of the lies told to mask its reprehensibility.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:40PM
Thank you meustrus, have some lame updoots :)
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S.S.FREEDOM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:07PM (5 children)
Posting a manifesto is not the same as a mass killing. Speaking of abstractions.
You apparently support censorship in this case, for whatever reason. Well guess what? Maybe Trump supports censorship too, and believes it's too important to be left to the whims of random website operators. And so the government will have to step in. What could go wrong?
Whether you want to censor trolls, bots, and hate speech, or copyright infringment, whistle blowers, and BDS, if enough fools jump on the censorship bandwagon we will end up with all of that and more.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:40PM (4 children)
Right now, website operators are free to take down any content they want. By law, at least. Practically, anything they start taking down can seriously threaten their business model.
Look at Tumblr. They are perfectly within their rights to censor adult content. But it wasn't a good idea for them to do that, because without it they have lost what made them special.
Does YouTube need nazi propaganda to make money? They were certainly happy to allow it for a while. But eventually, bad actors figured out how to abuse the algorithm to put fascist content where it threatened their other content sectors. YouTube desperately wants to be a platform for children. They only started taking down nazi propaganda when parents stopped letting their kids watch YouTube because of it.
As for 8chan and the manifesto, I think jmorris may have a point about having a contract with ISPs. There's a difference between YouTube censoring things and Cloudflare censoring things. 8chan existing isn't the same as YouTube promoting its content.
But I can't say for sure whether the manifesto is protected speech, because I haven't read it. I'm sure I could find it if I wanted to. But if it advocates for politically-motivated violence in defiance of the law, it may in fact be the kind of speech that it is safe, for the sake of political discourse, to let die.
That may be censorship. But for something like this to be taken down, it has to be toxic to everyone's business model. It has to be so awful that Cloudflare will lose business because of their association with it. That doesn't apply to more than a few things in this world.
It would be very different, of course, if the Executive Branch of The Government were allowed to demand things be taken down or left in place. There are very many things that Trump might like to censor in this way. It's far more dangerous to democracy than allowing the free market to decide what things are too toxic.
I have no doubt that this draft is mainly about deplatforming. But that's really a problem with social media. Twitter is too powerful. And if we can't trust our government to make good decisions about what speech is too dangerous, the free market is not a perfect substitute.
The real answer is to break up social media. It's far too powerful of a propaganda tool for anybody, no matter how well-intentioned the companies are in stymieing the flow of propaganda.
But when it comes to deplatforming, "break up social media" is effectively the same thing as "deplatform everyone". And yeah, I would support that. We'll still have ideas, we'll still spread them. But it will be harder for fringe ideas like joining a terrorist organization to gain traction.
(this turned into quite the rant, and I don't feel like going back and editing it, so if I misspoke I may need to come back and say "that's not what I meant" - sorry)
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:29PM (3 children)
It's much better to teach people, from infancy, to resist propaganda, and to accept responsibility for their choices.
Does reading all that "hate speech" make YOU want to go out and kill people? If not, there you go, free choice.
The audience is responsible for their choices, not the speaker. All your most infamous leaders are nothing without followers. Let's all stop wagging the dog.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:25PM (2 children)
Yeah, like teaching people to avoid Propaganda is somehow easier than breaking up centralized power blocks. Even if you could solve the teaching problem, those centralized power blocks still have a strong economic incentive not to let you teach it.
Personal responsibility is an excuse for con men to be allowed to swindle the masses. We have to accept that there will always be irresponsible people. If we allow con men to gain power via these irresponsible people, honest people will be unable to compete.
Some of our best laws are the ones that don't forbid you from doing sneaky things, but make you declare what sneaky things you are doing. You can then lie about it and be prosecuted for fraud, or be honest about it and only be able to target the truly oblivious.
These rules tend to break down though in the absence of free market competition. Facebook can do what it wants, because it has a monopoly on your friend graph.
That's why breaking up big business is important: this and other solutions to social problems only work with meaningful free market competition. In the case of Propaganda, personal responsibility is an impossible ideal as long as propagandists have the power to keep people stupid.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 15 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)
Even if you could solve the teaching problem, those centralized power blocks still have a strong economic incentive not to let you teach it.
Fine, then we're all on our own. We have to take our own initiative to turn our backs on the things we desire. People still have to be held liable for the choices they make. If not, then all bets are off.
Facebook is entertainment. I do not care what people do with it. There is no right for the state to regulate their content. They are in no way responsible for criminal acts by the users. Being a criminal is a personal choice.
The service providers are the ones with too much control. They are the ones we must regulate, as common carriers, at least until we can connect without being tethered to them.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday August 16 2019, @01:30AM
I don't disagree with you on government control. Even the common threat against net neutrality, the copyright industry, is really seeking to compel based on government authority.
Common carrier is another easy state policy that avoids corruption by applying cleanly and equally to everything.
When it comes to regulating above the service provider level, however, sometimes you need to do what you can to stop an industry from conning masses of people. Social media is built on psychological traps and paid for by corporate propaganda. Common carrier won't fix that.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:18PM (2 children)
There were Chinese language imageboards on 8chan which could be being used by Hong Kong protesters right now.
But the Media were too busy whipping up their revenge.
Not like the likes of Cloudfare wouldn't censor protestors on demand anyway.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:48PM (1 child)
Hm, that's some unfortunate collateral damage.
8chan probably should have been an open-source toolset, easy to spin up and deploy anywhere, instead of a single point of failure. That would work better for getting around Chinese censorship anyway.
If it was a network of independently-run imageboards, it would probably not impact society's ability to turn away from violent nazi propaganda. It just wouldn't implicate everyone else using the platform.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:50PM
Isn't that what Mastodon was supposed to be?
It doesn't work, because nobody uses it. But they could, it's GPL. But it only works if people use it.
OTOH, I don't use it, so I'm not really sure.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:39PM
Like I said, this is a distraction. I have little reason to engage with your strawman other than to quickly ignite it. The manifesto was the justification for action long planned, it was not the reason for it. Consider that it it is now known to have been crossposted from an original post on Instagram. Did instagram get deplatformed? It did not. Despite being a small poorly manned anonymous board, 8chan did remove the offending post within fifteen minutes and has cooperated with law enforcement as any legit site would do in a similar situation. Contrast to the Christchurch shooter livestreaming his rampage on Facebook and their far larger staff requiring forty-five minutes to remove it. Where were the calls to deplatform Facebook? Will Zuck lose his ability to have a credit card? Where are the calls to deplatform ANY Left of center content or platform, we know none have succeeded, but where can you even find the calls for it?
But yeah, even if the manifesto is legit and posted by a shooter (consensus is it isn't, but he isn't dead so we might find out eventually), it is probably legal content. That is what Free Speech is. The Unibomber's Manifesto, Christchurch shooter's manifesto, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, Mao's Little Red Book, The Koran, The Bible, and yes this doofus's pitiful manifesto, all of it. Yes people kill in the name of all of those works, but it is better they all be out in the open and debated. If you can't beat a bad idea with a better idea, maybe the idea isn't as bad as you thought. You only discover that through engaging with ideas and debating them. And if you disagree you do not support the idea of Free Speech, you are in fact an enemy of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:48PM
So how ironclad are their SLAs?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:23PM (4 children)
You mean the Cloudflare contract that states:
Or the Voxility one:
(Score: 2, Troll) by jmorris on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:00PM (3 children)
Yea, now consider Voxility canceled service with no notice on a Sunday evening because the New York Times demanded it. How is one ever supposed to do business on those terms? That ain't an end user service, it isn't even some cloud bs (which is why I avoid anything in the cloud btw, none of it can be depended upon) that is back haul bulk Internet we are talking about.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:46PM
This is the major problem, we need a service to connect. Everything else is a superficial abstraction.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:22PM
No notice to you, maybe. They are free to cut the line at the same time they send the requisite emails to the reseller. If you don't like that they agreed to those terms, then either accept that the current state of the free market is that almost everyone has such terms in their adhesion contracts or admit you don't want a free market when you ask the government to regulate contracts like these.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 16 2019, @11:55PM
This, though, is the logical endpoint of your libertarian views: corporations are free to do as they please, and no one is going to stop them, because regulations are for commies! And while we're at it, let them buy the government too (lobbying) because Money Is Speech (TM).
J-Mo, sorry to say this, but everything you're bitching about is self-inflicted.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:25PM (6 children)
Two points: the "voluntary contracts" meme has two sides; if you are a fascist, no one wants to contract with you, and they are free to not do so. You are going to force free capitalist entities to do business with you? How fascist.
Second, this is not your homeland, jmorris. You belong in the white Wakanda that is Poland, or the Urban capital of Hungaria. Or join Andrew Anglin in whatever dark hole he is hiding in. You have no homeland, jmorris, you are not domesticated, and barely human.
But, it is not surprising that at the end you come out for white supremacist fascist powers of the Trump State. This only shows that the entire "free speech" argument from the alt-right was and is nothing but the attempt to force the normalization of positions that no rational or reasonable human would entertain. In other words, the alt-right "free speech" is nothing but "alt-censorship". Irony? Or mendacity?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:43PM
Aw, I ran out of mod points.
+1 Insightful
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DutchUncle on Thursday August 15 2019, @03:16PM
+1 insightful.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:38PM (3 children)
Fascist has been redefined to mean "white" and/or "not leftist" unlike whatever it meant a century ago. Also we have plenty of recent drama where its illegal not to, say, bake a cake for gay people, so its hardly the first time social engineering has interfered with contract law.
The whole argument boils down to enjoying when other peoples ox is gored, not so much yours.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday August 15 2019, @10:03PM (1 child)
Right! And that is why I accuse the extreme right of mendacity. Oh, VLM, the definition of fascism is the use of state power for the interests of the business class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Friday August 16 2019, @01:33PM
So basically the Democratic Party platform.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday August 23 2019, @03:02PM
>>> its illegal not to, say, bake a cake for gay people
No, it's illegal to have a publicly licensed business in which you publicly offer a standard service for a standard price (e.g. a bakery baking cakes), and discriminate between potential customers based on non-business-related criteria.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 15 2019, @04:08PM
I'm not saying your position is wrong or that what was done to 8Chan was right. But it is currently legal as far as I can tell.
There are limits to free speech in my opinion. Hosting child porn. Advocating for the violent overthrow of the state (18 USC 2385). By the way, free advice being worth what you paid for it, reaching the point where you say you're going to be building your own government "here in our homeland" might come close to that if you're advocating such an overthrow instead of reform - just be careful because I respect you even when I disagree with you. But these limits establish that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and we come back to the oft repeated theory by me that Germans love David Hasselhoff, and that there are indeed limits to the rights we enjoy and freedoms are not unlimited and never have been.
Maybe it yet again comes back to Common Carrier status: If web access is private and not Common Carrier, then why does any part connected to it (platform, ISP, backbone, whatever) not have the right to do whatever it wants to in promoting or suppressing opinion so long as it is not governmentally ordered? Why would an individual's right to access or propagate ideas on it be protected? But if it is a Common Carrier, then one can hold the carrier liable to provide services so long as they are otherwise legal. Maybe the Right shot itself in the head by killing net neutrality. Personally I'd be much more in favor of a Common Carrier internet and where the propagators of material are positively identified in a way that they can be held personally liable for their civil or criminal actions (or where a carrier or platform that maintains such positive identifications then has immunity for the actions of those that can be held personally liable for what they do on the Internet).
One other little thing... as I read it on Vice, and am willing to be corrected, the opinion there was that Epik is not a carrier itself, but rather resells utilizing others feeds. If true, then maybe they were promising and selling things they didn't have the ability to commit to? Just a thought.
This sig for rent.