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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: 4, Insightful) by Socrastotle on Wednesday April 07 2021, @04:36AM (1 child)
Network effect [wikipedia.org]. It's the reason any of this is even an issue.
Had Trump relied on WhiteHouse.gov he'd probably have been able to express himself to a [relatively speaking] handful of deeply committed supporters. By speaking on a more public platform he's able to engage with a much wider audience. Same reason that works for a business of 3 people doesn't necessarily work for a business of 3 million people, let alone 3 billion.
It's also the same reason that you could create a website that literally every single person on Facebook agrees is objectively better in every single way, yet manage to attract basically nobody. They won't come to your site until "everybody else" comes to your site. And "everybody else" won't come, until they do. So nobody comes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @02:39PM
In simpler terms: I've heard various right-wingers bitching about their inability to speak to the public ... on TV. This wasn't the White House trying to reach the people this was about an attention-starved man.