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Leaked draft details Trump's likely attack on technology giants:
The Trump Administration is putting the final touches on a sweeping executive order designed to punish online platforms for perceived anti-conservative bias. Legal scholar Kate Klonick obtained a draft of the document and posted it online late Wednesday night.
[...] The document claims that online platforms have been "flagging content as inappropriate even though it does not violate any stated terms of service, making unannounced and unexplained changes to policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints, and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse."
The order then lays out several specific policy initiatives that will purportedly promote "free and open debate on the Internet."
First up is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
[...] Trump's draft executive order would ask the Federal Communications Commission to clarify Section 230—specifically a provision shielding companies from liability when they remove objectionable content.
[...] Next, the executive order directs federal agencies to review their ad spending to ensure that no ad dollars go to online platforms that "violate free speech principles."
Another provision asks the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether online platforms are restricting speech "in ways that do not align with those entities' public representations about those practices"—in other words, whether the companies' actual content moderation practices are consistent with their terms of service. The executive order suggests that an inconsistency between policy and practice could constitute an "unfair and deceptive practice" under consumer protection laws.
Trump would also ask the FTC to consider whether large online platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become so big that they've effectively become "the modern public square"—and hence governed by the First Amendment.
[...] Finally, the order directs US Attorney General William Barr to organize a working group of state attorneys general to consider whether online platforms' policies violated state consumer protection laws.
[Ed Note - The following links have been added]
Follow Up Article: Trump is desperate to punish Big Tech but has no good way to do it
The Executive Order: Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @05:07PM (7 children)
If it was printed in a letter to the editor in a newspaper, would you hold the newspaper liable? The paperboy? Your elementary English teachers? Perhaps all your teachers for failing to teach critical thinking? The person from which you obtained the controlled medication? The government that failed to regulate something that could kill you? Your hands for opening the bottle? The water company for providing the water that enabled your swallowing of the pills?
(Score: 2) by tizan on Friday May 29 2020, @08:19PM (6 children)
Newspaper explicitly qualify letters to the editor and opinion pieces...they have editorial notes to fact check some misleading statements...
They are in the business of delivering facts ...may be tainted by their bias.
If they publish an article stating that chloroquine is good against syphillis ...they can be sued.
Either facebook a news source like a newspaper or is like "The onion"....stating that all statements published here is a an attempt at joke and nothing here is known to be a fact !!
If facebook etc published every post .... qualified by "The onion" disclaimer ...then they are not liable.
But they want to make money because people believe what they are reading from their followee and followers is true
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 29 2020, @09:08PM (5 children)
That seems then, like the platform should not have liability for what the follower and followee say. Thus we should keep CDA 230 protections for the platform. Even if the platform fact checks and labels content and has a TOS. Or we could force all platforms into anarchy by not allowing them to police their content, while still being protected from bad things that others say, which they might not have policed or removed or labeled.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @12:00AM (4 children)
No one stops them from policing THEIR content for which THEY are responsible. When they start policing OTHERS' content like it was theirs, they become responsible for it like it was theirs. What is SO hard to understand?
When user WANTS the platform "policing content" for him, he can enable it for his own self in his own account's preferences. Precisely like it works here on Soylent; no one stops YOU from browsing at +1 or +5, and no one stops ME from reading any post I want regardless of its rating.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:01AM (2 children)
"Precisely like it works here on Soylent; no one stops YOU from browsing at +1 or +5, and no one stops ME from reading any post I want regardless of its rating."
Yeah!!! Because reading SN at +5 is so much more informative than reading at -1! </sarcasm>
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
It is. Reading at +5 will get you only democrat backslapping posts. Reading at -1 will show you everything that someone bothered to post, and you can use your own mind to judge its worth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @06:20PM
Poor, troll modded conservative trolls! So sad they have to live in the -1 basement! Like living under a bridge, and eating goats. Must be the inhumanity and stupidity. So sad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tizan on Sunday May 31 2020, @01:32AM
That is the problem ...a +5 comment is not a doctor or expert in the field comment.
That is the the problem according to me .... well liked comments get the status of expertise. Expertise is not bestowed by democracy nor are facts.
Right now very few people distinguishes upvoted comments with stiff that carries well checked facts and expertise. Policing is not going to solve the problem.
It goes against the social media revenue model....they make money by lots of people commenting and passing around stuff unchecked... videos of cats are harmless...telling people to take chloroquine because it has 70% success rate or stating so or so is a pedophile is not fine without facts to back it.
less than 1% of people that are on facebook or twitter cross check what they read from snopes or other such places.