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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: 1) by loki on Monday May 02 2022, @02:23AM
Compulsory voting helps democracy because it samples the entire population, not just the extreme fringes.
Single transferable vote (ranking candidates) helps because your vote is never wasted. If your first ranked choice isn't going to win, your vote moves on to your second choice, then your third choice if necessary, etc, until someone wins. In Australia you have the choice to vote for a political party, or for the individual candidates separately, so if you like a party but not a certain member of that party, you can break up your ranking to place that person after other members of the same party, or even after members of other parties. So you can rank parties, or rank individuals separately.
In the last decade in Australia, the removal of party preference backroom deals also has reduced confusion among voters. Before 2013, you couldn't tell if a vote for a certain party could be redirected to some other party if your chosen first party didn't win a seat. There were backroom preference deals that allowed parties to direct the flow of votes a certain way, and you had to look up the official election website to see what deals were in place. I remember making a spreadsheet that year to see which parties were preferencing which other parties. But that practice was abolished after the 2013 election, so your votes can only be redirected if you explicitly write further preferences such as second, third, fourth. So now, the only preference deals are what's shown on the party-specific how-to-vote cards the marketing people hand out on voting day outside the voting venues.
Lastly, polls close at 6pm, and we use pencil and paper, and get a result almost always on the night. We have confidence in that method because we don't use voting machines which could be tampered with remotely or via hacking.