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posted by chromas on Friday May 29 2020, @02:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the two-minutes-hate dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @05:38PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @05:38PM (#1000641)

    So at what point was anyone discriminated against due to their personal politics? Please enlighten us since that is the crux of your argument, and this requires actual facts not hearsay and accusations.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @06:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @06:27PM (#1000678)

    This is the departure point from conservatism to fascism, where it turns anti-conservative while remaining anti-liberal and anti-socialist.

  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:04PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:04PM (#1001140) Journal

    So at what point was anyone discriminated against due to their personal politics? Please enlighten us since that is the crux of your argument

    No, that's not the crux of what I'm saying at all.

    You think women are discriminated against because of politics?

    You think blacks are discriminated against because of politics?

    You think jews are discriminated against because of politics?

    You think polygamists are discriminated against because of politics?

    You think LGBTQ folk are discriminated against because of politics?

    Etc. etc.

    And of course there are myriad examples of this. You can find them everywhere from employers, to any club, towns and cities, to legislation, to Facebook's TOS and so on basically forever.

    Of course politics isn't why; politics can arise from the reasons, but that's very much a secondary effect. Discrimination, as a first cause, arises because there are huge numbers of repressive, small-minded assholes in the world, and those particular types of assholes love to play my clique / your clique with a huge dose of "fuck you, you're not my problem" to season.

    Discrimination in re speech, membership, attendance, jobs, etc., wears many, many ugly hats. And it's almost always entirely a bad thing. This is why I am against it. It's a fucking tremendously bad idea. Proponents of it are the lowest form of (supposedly) intelligent life on earth. But they should still be allowed to speak, attend, etc. 😊

    --
    Every once in a while declare peace. It confuses your enemies.