SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The decision, published Friday, was hailed by conservative litigation group the New Civil Liberties Alliance as a victory for free speech. But Eric Goldman, a professor, Santa Clara University School of Law, believes Biden administration foes may have scored an own-goal.
The lower court ruling [PDF], from Louisiana federal district Judge Terry A. Doughty on July 4, partially granted an injunction that broadly limited the extent to which US government agencies can deem content so potentially harmful that they urge social media sites to remove it from their services.
Judge Doughty determined that the plaintiffs – the State of Missouri, the State of Louisiana, Dr Aaron Kheriaty, Dr Martin Kulldorff, Jim Hoft, Dr Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Jill Hines – made sufficiently strong arguments that their speech was suppressed at the direction of the government that they are likely to succeed at trial.
In short: the judge partially granted their request to prohibit the government from telling social media companies how to moderate content.
The United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'
"Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the court is only examining it in terms of plaintiffs' likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario," Judge Doughty wrote in a memorandum explaining his ruling.
"During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth.'"
[...] The Fifth Circuit, called the "most politically conservative circuit court" in the US, dialed that injunction back somewhat. The appellate ruling [PDF] affirmed part of the ruling, reversed part of it, vacated part of the injunction, modified part of the injunction.
The three-judge appeals panel said nine of the lower court's ten prohibitions were vague and overly broad at this stage of the litigation.
"Prohibitions one, two, three, four, five, and seven prohibit the officials from engaging in, essentially, any action 'for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing' content moderation," the appeals panel said. "But 'urging, encouraging, pressuring' or even 'inducing' action does not violate the Constitution unless and until such conduct crosses the line into coercion or significant encouragement."
And citing problems with prohibitions eight, nine and ten, they vacated all save for the sixth, which they modified to state that government officials or their agents can take "no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech."
Not all speech in the US is protected, so this injunction – in place while the case is being heard – does not apply to government communication to social media companies about: incitement to imminent unlawful action; harassment; credible threats; defamation; obscenity and child pornography; among other exceptions.
"The line between impermissible state intervention and ordinary government functions is really murky, and this opinion doesn't really try to clarify that," Santa Clara University’s Goldman told The Register in a phone interview.
"They simply decide some things are impermissible. Other things are okay. And that makes the rule from the case impossible to operationalize, for the government and possibly for the services. Nobody exactly knows what they're going to be required to do based on this ruling."
The line between impermissible state intervention and ordinary government functions is really murky, and this opinion doesn't really try to clarify that
[...] "The court said it is impermissible for the government to commandeer content moderation practices," he said. "But that's exactly what the Florida and Texas social media censorship laws did. They literally overrode the social media companies' editorial discretion via government edict.
"And thus, the Fifth Circuit, the same court, upheld those interventions, saying that was constitutionally permissible for the government to dictate content moderation operations. In other words, this opinion is in irreconcilable tension with the Fifth Circuit's earlier opinion on the social media censorship laws."
Also, Goldman observed that the Fifth Circuit seems to be saying that these social media companies risk becoming state actors by engaging with government officials.
For example, with regard to platform cooperation in limiting health misinformation, there's passage in the opinion that says, "In sum, we find that the White House officials, in conjunction with the Surgeon General's office, coerced and significantly encouraged the platforms to moderate content. As a result, the platforms’ actions 'must in law be deemed to be that of the State.'"
"That's a huge problem for the government," he continued. "If internet companies become state actors, then they cannot report information about their users to law enforcement unless they comply with all the laws on criminal procedure."
As an example, Goldman cited how the government requires internet services to provide data about child sexual abuse material. If those companies become state actors through government intervention, he said, then those reports become impermissible evidence because they haven't been done in compliance with legal rules that constrain the government.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 17 2023, @03:00AM (15 children)
That's putting things mildley. I'll insist that the period was characterized by fear. Plain, simple, abject fear. And, the fear theater was led primarily by progressive liberal Democrats who cherished the idea of authoritarian government controlling our lives.
Everyone has the right to say that Dr. Fauci is full of shit, that Bill Gates and the government's researchers were involved in Hunan's bioresearch, and more. What's more, they have the right to say such things without government interference.
And, I'll insist one more time that social media is the de facto town square today. NO ONE except "mostly peaceful protesters" goes to the town square to burn the city down. Everyone is on social media. Neither social media nor government has the right to silence a point of view. And, no, it doesn't matter that the point of view opposes an authoritarian's deepest fears. It doesn't even matter that if a point of view becomes popular, it might cost lives. None of the excuses matter.
Bottom line, authoritarian assholes thought they could silence anyone whose opinions differed from their own.
People should be going to prison for such blatant violations of civil rights.
The Youngbloods certainly knew their Democrats. Just listen to the first few lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xGxQXmu7Os [youtube.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2023, @03:53AM (1 child)
Heh. I got permabanned from Twitter for saying Fouci should have been hung drawn and quarterd. Aparently that's seen as violent speech over there.
And this was only a couple of months ago. So much for thier free speech rhetoric.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2023, @06:17AM
It's because the proper word is hanged. They're obviously grammar nazis. /sarcasm.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Sunday September 17 2023, @10:27AM (8 children)
See, that's what I love about you Americans, you'll even protect my right to lie to you and destabilize your country.
The funniest part of that is that it's mostly done today by the people who pretend they love their country the most.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 17 2023, @12:39PM (6 children)
>protect my right to lie to you and destabilize your country ... it's mostly done today by the people who pretend they love their country the most.
Chaos is opportunity for change. Those who would be king (or the power behind the throne) but are not quite there yet have fomented chaos for centuries.
It's part of the basis of the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and all that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Sunday September 17 2023, @01:07PM (5 children)
Anyone who has experienced radical change in their life knows that this isn't exactly something to look forward to.
Change is not always a good thing. Especially when you're already starting at a pretty high level, the chance that it's going down simply is greater than the chance of going up.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 17 2023, @02:06PM (4 children)
> this isn't exactly something to look forward to.
Most people hate change, particularly those who are in a good place, or at least a not intolerable place.
The thing about happiness is: it's relative, and plenty of people "near the top" literally would rather die trying to be #1 instead of living their lives out as #2. Even more common, they'd rather thousands - even millions - of other people die for their try to be #1.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday September 17 2023, @02:18PM (3 children)
Ok, and I won't stand in their way to either #1 or death, either is fine by me, as long as I don't have to join in the conga line.
Seriously, I'm done trying to save people from their own stupidity. It's time to chlorinate the gene pool and weed out the idiots. Of course only by their own doing, I'm not gonna waste time on offing them, they're quite capable of doing that themselves if we don't try to keep them alive unnecessarily.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 17 2023, @03:14PM (2 children)
Transparency is always the answer...
All this chaos and shaking up the current world order so new marbles can shift to the top is primarily driven by lies and deceit, conflation and misdirection. Unwrapping all of that so that rational, intelligent, well educated actors can make rational choices - that's the world I'd like to drive toward. If idiots want to act idiotically, I'm all for letting them win Darwin awards, I just hate to see good people taken down by deliberately hidden information.
There's also the problem that life is too short and people learn too slowly for the young to truly be well educated, so we have all these heuristic shortcuts of what is good and moral and all that which mostly try to drive people toward choices that are good for themselves - but like all shortcuts, they're not the whole story, and all too often people rely on them when they shouldn't and bad actors subvert them for their own goals that hurt those who they manipulate.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday September 18 2023, @07:09AM (1 child)
There are sometimes reasons for hiding information. Mostly because of the aforementioned bad actors, but also because people are egoistical, greedy bastards.
Case in point, the god-damn masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, people were told they shouldn't use them. Even though, yes, we already knew they could curtail infections. But we also knew that we don't have enough to supply the whole population. So imagine what would happened if you told people "this is how you protect yourself". Everyone would have hoovered them up. By the truckload. Think toilet paper, just even more crazy. You know, though, that hospitals are direly dependent on them, now imagine what it would have been like if suddenly hospitals stood there without masks.
Then finally we had them in sufficient supply. By that time we already knew that they have only a limited effect in protecting the wearer, what they really are great for is protect others if the wearer is already infected. Not being able to project their germs does indeed lower the chance of infecting someone else. If you tell people exactly this, nobody wears a mask. "Why should I protect someone else?" and "But if I'm already infected, what's the point?" would certainly have been the general sentiment and nobody would have worn them.
People are egoistical, greedy assholes. You have to work around this defect.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 18 2023, @01:29PM
Sure, and information always takes time to spread so laws like insider trading bans make sense - unless you're Martha Stewart or a Congresscritter... they're so special they don't have to play fair, and when they get caught they still get special treatment.
The mask fiasco was certainly imperfect, but I also sort of applaud the semi-transparency of "well, yeah, sure, we said that, but here's why:" that came out at least through the channels I was getting my info from.
>People are egoistical, greedy assholes. You have to work around this defect.
Agreed, there's no fixing that in the people themselves.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cykros on Monday September 18 2023, @09:41AM
The alternative is to allow only one particularly powerful group to decide who gets to lie to us, which tends to lead to the population being more trusting as a whole. It's largely what we had through most of the 20th century, particularly toward the end, with the consolidation of media companies into one big mono-message.
This censorship push is just that system having a tantrum. And yes, there will be growing pains, as many have become institutionalized. But there is also no reasonable alternative.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday September 17 2023, @12:22PM (1 child)
Right...because it's not like anyone was dying from that shit or anything. I won't even get started on the absurdity of anyone from the American right...the ones enamored with the likes of Putin and Orbán...ranting about authoritarianism. Do you ever actually hear yourself??
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2023, @03:05PM
You mean senile Uncle Joe? The one who is sending Americans to fight and die in Ukraine to prop up his corrupt crime family?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2023, @01:20PM
This is what makes you "that guy".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Monday September 18 2023, @04:08AM
"It doesn't even matter that if a point of view becomes popular, it might cost lives."
For instance, the opinion becoming popular that being a British subject sucked, leading to the American War for Independence.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.