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Jawboning In Plain Sight: The Unconstitutional Censorship Tolerated By The DMCA
For better or worse, jawboning has been a hot topic recently, and it's unlikely that interest will fade any time soon. Jawboning, in broad strokes, is when the government pressures a third party to make that third party chill the speech of another instead of going after the speech directly. Because the First Amendment says that the government cannot go after speech directly, this approach can at first seem to be the "one easy trick" for the government to try to affect the speech it wants to affect so that it could get away with it constitutionally. But as the Supreme Court reminded earlier this year in NRA v. Vullo, it's not actually constitutional to try this sort of end-run around the First Amendment.
[....] there should be concern about Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and how it operates to force intermediaries to act against users and their speech, whether they would want to or not, and whether the targeted speech is wrongful or not.
[....] "Why now?" After all, the DMCA has been working its unconstitutional way for a quarter of a century, and we've been tolerating it. But tolerating the intolerable does not make it tolerable.
Yep! Just pretend it's a copyright issue and fraudulently file a DMCA, under plenty of perjury, to silence what you don't like.
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Friday November 22, @10:02AM (1 child)
The problem is: The oligarchy chooses the two people you get to select from. This was proven beyond a reasonable doubt when Bernie Sanders, a true populist, was kicked out of the race by the DNC in 2020 by forcing all the other candidates to drop out and endorsing Biden. When they were taken to court over the action, their defense was that it was their *right* to rig the primary. The courts agreed with them! Sure, it's *theoretically* possible to get 50.1% of the voting public to write in an alternate candidate, but getting 75+ million people to take any collective action not presented before them is a pipe dream, at best, delusional, at worst.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @07:24PM
Well, there you go. How is that the party's fault? They are merely exploiting our own weaknesses. Are we just going to let them? It seems the choice is still ours, not theirs.