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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 29 2020, @10:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the speak-up-now dept.

The Growing Threat to Free Speech Online:

There are times when vitally important stories lurk behind the headlines. Yes, impeachment is historic and worth significant coverage, but it's not the only important story. The recent threat of war with Iran merited every second of intense world interest. But what if I told you that as we lurch from crisis to crisis there is a slow-building, bipartisan movement to engage in one of most significant acts of censorship in modern American history? What if I told you that our contemporary hostility against Big Tech may cause our nation to blunder into changing the nature of the internet to enhance the power of the elite at the expense of ordinary Americans?

I'm talking about the poorly-thought-out, poorly-understood idea of attempting to deal with widespread discontent with the effects of social media on political and cultural discourse and with the use of social media in bullying and harassment by revoking or fundamentally rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

[...] In 1996, [Congress] passed Section 230. The law did two things. First, it declared that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." In plain English, this means that my comments on Twitter or Google or Yelp or the comments section of my favorite website are my comments, and my comments only.

But Section 230 went farther, it also declared that an internet provider can "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" without being held liable for user content. This is what allows virtually all mainstream social media companies to remove obscene or pornographic content. This allows websites to take down racial slurs – all without suddenly also becoming liable for all the rest of their users' speech.

It's difficult to overstate how important this law is for the free speech of ordinary Americans. For 24 years we've taken for granted our ability to post our thoughts and arguments about movies, music, restaurants, religions, and politicians. While different sites have different rules and boundaries, the overall breadth of free speech has been extraordinary.

[...] Large internet companies that possess billions of dollars in resources would be able to implement and enforce strict controls on user speech. Smaller sites simply lack the resources to implement widespread and comprehensive speech controls. Many of them would have no alternative but to shut down user content beyond minimalist input. Once again, the powerful would prevail.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:21PM (#950628)

    This is exactly the attitude I want to highlight. "Deviants will be expelled".

    Cool, I just started to get bored of hypocritical society dances of the insincere "inclusion" and "CoC" kind.
    Time for those expelled to own their ideas, assume all consequences and have the courage to establish their own place in the global village rather then crave acceptance.
    Maybe it won't have hookers and blackjack, but I guarantee they'll be happier between the like-minded them. That is, unless they are actually drama queen type themselves, everything they do is just posing, fakery or connery. If the latter, I have this violin which I believe is the smallest in the world.

    Like atheists, free thinkers, political dissidents and the other undesirable deviants of society at various points in history, you will learn to expel them in defense of the system, you will justify how it is necessary and you will be unrepentant about it.
    ... That's the brand of Totalitarianism to come, the very people it crushes under its boots are also its most fervent supporters...

    Look, every N-dimensional body with N>0 has a fringe. What that body does with its fringe, include it as a closed set or expels it as an opened set, will not make the fringe modify its nature - it will still be a fringe. The sooner the fringe accepts itself as it is an finds a way to deal with its own nature, the better.
    The sooner the body decides if it wants to embrace its fringe and become closed or adopt a suicidal attitude of expelling the fringe (and thus expose another fringe. Rinse and repeat?), the better too.
    Any situation of undecided status between the main body and its fringe is a compromising compromise, a lose-lose situation.