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Greene offers bill to abolish Section 230
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday is introducing a bill to abolish Section 230 — the law the protects online platforms from liability — on the heels of Twitter accepting Elon Musk's offer to buy the company and take it private.
Greene's bill would eliminate the law making online platforms not liable for content posted by third parties and replace it with a provision to require "reasonable, non-discriminatory access to online communications platforms" through a "common carrier" framework that Greene compared to airlines or package delivery services.
Republicans have long claimed that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias, pointing to tweets that have been taken down and the removal of entire feeds from networks.
[....] Titled the 21st Century FREE Speech Act, Greene's measure will serve as the House version of a Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.).
To combat the alleged bias against conservatives, it would prevent online communications platforms from exerting "undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, political or religious group or affiliation, or locality" and would provide consumers a mechanism to sue for violations.
Should any platform be liable for someone else's speech? Even if they engage in moderation?
(Score: 5, Informative) by bussdriver on Friday April 29 2022, @04:31PM (11 children)
Section 230 protects speech! Fools...
Liability will make every service provider a private censor and not even government-level censorship but FAR worse because even Russian or Chinese censorship is narrowly focused while corporate liability would include ANY possible lawsuit from anybody on any topic. Even nutjobs like her would sue over people talking shit about her - because hypocrisy is her superpower.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday April 29 2022, @04:37PM
They're not usually so obvious about creating the very problems they are claiming to fight.
The pragmatic result of this law will be every US platform becomes MORE twitchy on that delete trigger than before. Thus resulting in even more censorship of the wacky crap that's already getting deleted.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @05:00PM
This has nothing to do with the law. This is showing you're fighting for the "real Americans." It's like the Ivy League lawyer governors knowingly passing blatantly unconstitutional laws or executive orders. They know they will get overturned, but they get the glory of showing that they're on the front line fighting "woke" socialists or whatnot, and they're happy to abdicate their responsibilities to the courts. It gets them a juicy segment on Fox News where they'll get asked softball questions and show they're "owning the libs" while building their national profile.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday April 30 2022, @03:25AM (4 children)
MTG knows this.
There are a lot of people who are running around today that seem to believe the Republicans are a party in favor of personal freedom and liberty. In case you didn't notice, that's quite simply a lie: They're very explicit that they want to control things like who you are banging, what kinds of images and films you can see on a computer, what kind of religion you can practice, what kinds of clothing you can wear depending on what shape your pee-pee was when you were born, and what kind of music you can enjoy.
In the case of political speech, they'd really really like to arrange things so that the only kind of information you can encounter is that which is written, produced, and completely controlled by the apparatus of movement conservatism. You might be allowed a choice, but that choice is between Fox News, OAN, Sinclair Broadcasting Group, and maybe InfoWars to create a controlled opposition. The opposition to Section 230 is precisely because they want to have the power to control online speech with threats of organization-destroying lawsuits if the tech companies don't do what they want. And I should mention SN probably wouldn't be immune to this if anything were published here that they took notice of.
To understand Republicans, abandon any pretense of intellectual consistency or higher principles, and focus on simply what will give themselves the most power and money, and you'll be able to predict them quite easily.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @08:56AM (3 children)
No politicians are advocating for the return of sodomy laws. I bet even Greg Locke isn't advocating for sodomy laws any more.
I guess you're talking about the Communications Decency Act? Let's see... that was introduced by a Democratic senator [eff.org], supported by 40 more Democratic senators [senate.gov], and signed by a Democratic President [eff.org].
Really? Why not read this article [theatlantic.com] from notorious right-wing mouthpiece The Atlantic, about Sam Brownback (the guy whose picture is in the dictionary next to "religious right"), who happened to be the head of the State Department's Office of Religious Freedom in the Trump administration. The article describes his efforts to protect Uighur Muslims, Yazidis, and all manner of oppressed religious minorities (the ones that leftists always seem to clam up about for fear of upsetting their beloved Chinese Communists).
But, but, the article has to remind us what a bigot Trump is, because he says Islamic terrorists! Of course, this doesn't stop leftists from constantly talking about "Christian nationalists" and every other manner of horrible Christian this, Christian that. It happens later in the same article, in fact. If not for double standards, leftists wouldn't have any standards at all.
Or you could listen to what Trump himself had to say.
Meanwhile, in Morocco, 80 people were just arrested for eating in public during Ramadan [youtube.com].
Who is advocating for legal restrictions on clothing?
That's a good one. Were you around during the 80s and early 90s when music censorship was a major issue? I remember all those prominent Republicans who were leading the charge, people like Tipper Gore, Carol Moseley-Braun, Fritz Hollings, Judith Toth [wikipedia.org]... wait a minute those weren't Republicans at all.
Sure, some social conservatives were on board too, like Bob Dole, and Reagan was broadly supportive of the goal of cleaner music lyrics without actually endorsing any specific legislative action. But it's wildly wrong to characterize this as a Republican-only (or even Republican-led) issue.
And that's obviously why Republicans universally support free-speech-promoting policies, while leftists are currently melting down over the possibility that Twitter might start allowing people to post politically inconvenient facts [nypost.com]. Meanwhile, reinstatement of the "fairness doctrine" (in which the government mandates who is allowed to say what and when) is is mostly supported by Democrats and universally opposed by Republicans [wikipedia.org], because as Democrats occasionally admit, they think there are too many conservatives on talk radio, and they don't like that. And they want it to apply to everything, not just to public broadcasts [blogspot.com].
Saying the quiet part out loud...
Funny that. I'm thinking of a prominent politician who is possibly the greatest pro-censorship crusader [reason.com] in the history of the United States. I'll give you one clue: You probably voted for her in 2016.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @09:02AM
Oops! I forgot to include the bits about how Democrats keep trying to create the Ministry of Truth, even though it's in the news right now [washingtonpost.com].
But this isn't even the first time! [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @09:49PM (1 child)
Unhinged rant about Republicans, modded insightful
Well sourced factual refutation, modded troll
Yep, it's definitely the conservatives who are allergic to the truth, definitely
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @10:32PM
Poor crazies taking rightwing news seriously. Do you realize Fox's own lawyers argued Fox programs are entertainment no one would take seriously? Also, when you repeatedly spam the site with unhinged religious racism why would anyone put effort into finding out if another rant is based in any semblance of reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @05:08AM (3 children)
Not so fast. There are common carrier protections, which don't fall away just because a thing involved digital signals. Taking away 230 without a plan B would suck, but common carrier status is not a bad deal in itself.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @02:29PM (2 children)
Common carrier works fine for ISPs and hosting services, but it falls far short for community sites like SN. A community site that can't self moderate can't survive because it will be overrun by trolls and spammers, but the existing law is based around newspaper letters to the editor where every post is moderated before publishing. That's why Section 230 was created, to make live posting legally compatible with moderation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @03:20PM (1 child)
You're pinning it down to one form of moderation, which just isn't true. Just off the top of my head, when you have a pseudonymous community supporting ad hoc pseudonymity for the otherwise accountless, self-moderation works very quickly and effectively. Go on, show up, rant about how the lizard people are sucking your precious vital fluids and you'll find that nobody cares and you can scream into a void to your heart's content but you won't have much effect on the virtual air quality. Similarly, community moderation afforded to users, along similar lines to the reddit strategy, is just fine under this model.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2022, @10:15AM
Spoken like someone who wasn't around when /guro/ raided 4chan. Section 230 is what lets message boards defend themselves from those types of attacks.