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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: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 29 2020, @05:07PM (4 children)
- Because there is good reason to believe their leader, who a large percentage of conservatives loudly profess their support for, raped a 13-year-old, and at the very least was good friends with someone running an international sex trafficking ring where rape of teenagers was a common occurrence.
- Because when they ran a known pedo for senate in Alabama, he got lots of conservative votes.
- Because there's an entire subculture of conservative America where very young girls are all but forced to marry adult men (who then rape them, if they hadn't raped them before the forced marriage), and conservatives don't speak out against that.
- Because when children are raped, conservatives almost universally blame the child and excuse the rapist.
- Because many of them profess religions that accept and in some cases encourage all of this.
So it's entirely reasonable to believe that conservative thought considers child molesting to be acceptable.
Because they regularly treat minor things as leading directly to much more dire things. For example:
- Proposals to raise taxes on rich people to pay for public services or reduce the national debt are treated as identical to suggesting that the country be taken over by the Khmer Rouge.
- Proposals to more strictly regulate firearms are treated as identical to suggesting that we should have a fascist dictatorship.
- Telling people to stay home as much as possible and wear a mask when not at home are treated as identical to imprisoning everyone.
- Proposals to reduce the use of coal and oil and natural gas for environmental reasons are treated as identical to replacing capitalism with communism.
- Posting a fact-check along with a politician's tweet is treated as identical to liberals creating a Ministry of Truth that censors what everyone can say.
Or a really big example of this: Conservatives started the American Civil War not over anything Abe Lincoln had done (because he hadn't been inaugurated when they started), nor anything he had proposed doing during his campaign, but over what they feared his proposals might eventually cause decades later.
Protest is the tool of the powerless. The powerful are the sort that don't need to protest, because they're already getting exactly what they want. In the case of colleges and universities, what conservatives are doing is appointing conservative presidents of public universities, who in turn hire conservative deans, and the new conservative university administrations have been systematically eliminating tenure for decades so they can fire professors who say things they don't like.
As for "safe spaces", I'm guessing you've never encountered situations where they were a damn good idea, e.g. women who have been raped that need some place where they know there won't be men around to recover from their PTSD reactions. And no, it's not a major inconvenience for men for those spaces to exist, you just don't go into those spaces the same way you don't walk into the women's bathroom.
Because that's what they vote for. Consistently. As a simple example of this, 4 years ago conservatives in the US had the choice between running a guy with a long history of open racism, and a bunch of other conservatives who had plenty of other problems but no open racism, and they chose to back the racist.
Is every conservative a Klansman or Nazi? No. But given a choice between voting for a Klansman and voting for a centrist with the "wrong" party label, more than you'd like to admit will vote for the Klansman, and they will justify it on the grounds that voting for the "wrong" party is identical to electing Fidel Castro. And potentially more telling at least in my state was the election in which approximately 1/4 of the people who normally vote Republican either didn't vote or voted Democrat when the Republican candidate was black.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Friday May 29 2020, @05:30PM (2 children)
So, basically Clinton, Obama, and Biden did all that stuff and the best defense is a strong offense.
Know its all going to come up against the D party, so make endless noise about how its actually the R party doing all that, LOL.
Kinda "meh".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @09:52PM
This is moronic.
Just because A did so, does not excuse B.
And I say this as a foreigner who really enjoys seeing the US going down in flames (even although I know this will hurt the rest of the world as well). Your silly D vs R arguments. Pathetic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @01:19AM
They should all be investigated and sentenced for what they're guilty of, but the corruption plaguing the entire federal government (and the other layers are often even worse) ensures that justice will never be served. Conspiracy theorists and con artists are given legitimacy, because there exist actual and obvious conspiracies.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @12:22AM
Fixed your post to reveal your true colors...