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Justice Clarence Thomas suggests US should regulate Twitter and Facebook:
Justice Clarence Thomas suggested on Monday that Congress should consider whether laws should be updated to better regulate social media platforms that, he said, have come to have "unbridled control" over "unprecedented" amounts of speech.
The provocative and controversial opinion comes as Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from its platform for violating its rules on incitement of violence and some conservatives have called on more regulations in the tech world to combat what they view as political bias on social media.
"If part of the problem is private, concentrated control over online content and platforms available to the public, then part of the solution may be found in doctrines that limit the right of a private company to exclude, " Thomas wrote in a 12-page concurring opinion Monday.
Thomas's stance will raise concerns from critics who point out that social media platforms have not historically been subject to such content regulation, but instead have been left to devise their policies on their own.
[...] Today's digital platforms, Thomas argued, "provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech," but he said it also concentrates control "of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties."
[...] "The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions," he added.
[...] The conservative justice said that the court will soon have "no choice" but to address how legal doctrines apply to "privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms."
Katie Fallow, a First Amendment expert at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University said that the group actually shares Thomas concern about the power over speech being concentrated in the hands of so few. "But we think that concentrating that same power in the hands of government regulators will not necessarily solve the problems associated with social media companies." Instead, she worried it might exacerbate the issue.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @02:46AM (4 children)
Or, bear with me here, people can choose to use different platforms. Facebook, Twitter and Google restricting your speech? Publish somewhere else! What we must do is safeguard our ability to self-publish, prevent authoritarians from violating our constitutional rights.
I can imagine some legislation to regulate social media companies that would not violate the constitution, but it is a tricky proposition.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @03:52PM (3 children)
This has its own subset of issues. Hypothetically, the more removed a platform becomes the smaller the sample of the population and thus the higher the probability for biases. What you end up with in short is echochambers, which is an issue of no small magnitude itself. Additionally, you have smaller counts of bona fide professionals interacting and elucidating the crowd on the finer nuances of special-topic X; even removing the bar of professionality, you're also reducing the general count of the well studied in all topics which couldn't necessarily be described as "professional". One outcome I can imagine emerging from such a confounded rot is the election of de facto leaders, and further unification of thought. In itself not a bad thing, but it's quite probable that without the challenge of argumentative assertion from the wider spectrum a person could conceivably enchant themselves, and thus their supplicants with a degree of delusion. And I'm under the impression this is precisely what happened with the Parler incident, but I won't lie: my knowledge of the whole debacle is limited to a small handful of very public incidents. If that is so, it indicates to me that deplatforming has a net-negative effect of creating the very same circumstances described above.
What we have to engage with is the power-law distributions that occur naturally. We're not working in a vacuum. We're working with humans. There is a winner-take-all effect, and the winners in this case require regulation or there's a good chance that ideological conflicts will multiply a thousandfold as a product of pseudo-anonymity, walled gardens, and unchallenged delusion. Not to mention the serious implications that further isolating the individual, as in political atomization and the helplessness it induces as described a la Chomsky.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @06:37PM (2 children)
People are free to associate with whomever they'd like, and no one is guaranteed a platform. Myspace disappeared when people left, just don't participate and keep spreading the word to your friends and family about how these mega platforms abuse them. Anything else is likely to be authoritarian bullshit, so any regulations applied must prioritize protecting constitutional rights.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @06:27AM (1 child)
You completely skated the issue. It's about having the largest intersecting surfaces. The more communities intersect, the faster the shit ones get stomped out. When you deliberately eliminate one from a platform, it just creates a new environment with a much higher probability of radicalization. In one hand that's good, I mean, that's kinda how the US emerged. This isn't the late 18th century, the workings are far more abstract in basically every capacity, which means information itself is more complicated, and can be used to construct fallacious narratives. If you have 3b twatters ejecting, you've got a much higher probability of finding a ground truth or resolution. That requires open platforms, period. Not to mention your "solution" solves nothing, it just moves the winner around. I agree with your assessment of the hazards though, regulation is hardly a sufficient means. Really, all that needs to be done is "don't deplatform anything that doesn't tangibly threaten direct harm or what have you" and we've eliminated the whole of the issue, except maybe advertisers don't want associated with certain groups, so maybe a cute little subsidy package, or tell them to get over it - this is America.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @06:27PM
Obviously false or the propaganda campaigns done over social media would have failed. You are simply pushing the paradox of tolerance, intentionally or not. Freedom of association is VERY American, though I am open to regulating any communications platforms like we did to Ma Bell. Better be careful, your desired authoritarian approach to web services just might impact places like SoylentNews in ways you may not like.