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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) by DannyB on Monday June 01 2020, @03:30PM (1 child)
A site can be completely neutral (maybe). Or it can have a point of view. I don't see anything wrong with either approach as long as it is clear.
Regardless of whether a site is neutral or biased, it shouldn't be liable for the words of others hosted on that platform. The liability (if any actually exists) should be upon the person who wrote those words.
No. But because it's the right thing.
It is the right thing regardless of which way a web platform leans. In the era of Trump I see a lot of people who like (or dislike) rules that favor Trump, but fail to consider when the shoe is on the other foot. I am old enough to remember many past administrations and always think about the shoe on the other foot.
I may not like a right wing site, but it seems to me that the site should have no liability for the words of others posted on that site. Obviously if I were considering my own political interest, I would write the rule like this:
For Republicans: the web site should have liability for the words of others, and must be forced to have a liberal point of view
For Democrats: the web site should never be liable for the words of others, and should be allowed to say anything it wants.
But what I actually think is: A site should be able to exercise it's own point of view, including moderation, fact checking, etc, AND ALSO be shielded from liability caused by words that other people write. And I think that no matter which way the wind blows today.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 2) by slinches on Monday June 01 2020, @10:48PM
Whose speech is that? Yours? Mine? Should I not be held liable for that statement because I only used your words to construct it?
When a site takes speech out of context, cherry-picks the voices it wants heard or attaches it's own messages using privileges only the platform has access to, I think they should be considered complicit in the content on their platform. The manipulations may not be as obvious as the example above, but that makes it all the more imperative to ensure that the line between the users content and a platforms remains a crystal clear one.