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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @06:44PM (6 children)
That is not the same situation. A town is geographically limited, there were no other public space options available. Twitter is just one service and being banned from there does not prevent someone from publishing their opinions online.
False equivalence for the lose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @06:56PM
If it _was_ the same situation it would be settled. Of course it's not the same situation. Arguing a false equivalence essentially boils down to you don't think the situation is close enough. But maybe it is. It's a question of how close the situations are and I don't think there was proof enough to say they have nothing in common to the point that the same principle might come into play.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @07:47PM (4 children)
What do you mean? There were literally thousands of other cities where they could share their pamphlets, they could have even shared them outside the company's territory. For instance there were connecting neighborhoods and other areas that were not owned by the company.
This case is near identical in nature. Because the issue comes down to meaningfulness. They obviously wanted to distribute on the company's property because the company controlled the central districts or prime areas. The company wanted the best of both worlds in being able to act like a public platform, yet being able to, at its discretion, swap faces back to declaring itself a private entity to effectively restrict the constitutional protections of its residents at its sole discretion.
This case is probably an even more clear example because while there are thousands of other cities and so on, in this case there are a strictly limited number of sites with an outsized share of control of all online discourse. And due to the nature of critical mass, it's probably quite literally impossible to meaningfully compete against these sites at this point. So the argument people can just go elsewhere is, at best, very weak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @12:09AM (3 children)
Meatspace != cyberspace
Besides, the situation itself isn't even analogous. It would be the same if the company town had set up another representative next to the lady to hand out pamphlets about science and education.
Now they did censor Trump's re-tweet of the death threat against Democrats, but that is not protected speech and they didn't ban Trump's account.
Watching you conservatives flip out over nothing is just too precious.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday May 31 2020, @01:14PM (2 children)
That's an interesting take on how people should react when they feel their rights are being violated: they're flipping out over nothing.
Do you feel that way also about the protestors flipping out over George Floyd's death? His rights were violated, but the protestors' weren't. What are they so upset about, right?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @03:59PM
No, I consider Twitter moderating their own platform to be completely legal and in line with the constitution. I may not like how Twitter or Facebook runs their services, but I'm not a moron like you who thinks it is a broach of anyone's freedoms. Well, except for selling people's personal data, but we don't yet have strong data privacy laws yet.
Didn't think you would sink so low, you really did become a true blue Trumpette.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:44PM
I don't think you'll find anyone who condones the rioters, but at least they were spurred by murder and not a child's nonsensical temper tantrum.