So there's apparently a leaked draft of an executive order to
allegedly "censor the internet".
Supposedly, it's meant to combat corporate censorship of "conservative speech" (which according to research isn't happening) by some tweaking of the interpretation of §230 of the CDA by the FCC. And everyone is running around claiming it's government censorship.
Disclaimer: Fuck Ajit Pai. I do not trust the FCC or any of the bought regulatory bodies to not screw this up or abuse it. Also not a lawyer.
But effectively, to my knowledge, it comes down on narrowing the protections for "good samaritan" content moderation.
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).CDA §230The term "otherwise objectionable" in §230(c)(2)(A) effectively gives private entities free reign on how they moderate their platforms and what content can go up there. That is, it enables corporate censorship, to my understanding. The other terms do it as well, but to an obviously lesser extent.
Narrowing down the interpretation of this can become problematic if biased (it's FCC so obviously it will), but I object to calling it censorship, since it only limits the ability of the private entity to curate their publicly-accessible platform.
At worst, it's compelled speech. And even that isn't quite correct since they're not obligated to provide the servers for everyone's speech, they'd only be obligated to be "blind" to the content of the speech that gets posted (to the extent of the rules of the FCC, anything beyond is "fair game").
Furthermore, compelled speech would imply that the private entity is the "speaker", which I believe §230(c)(1) already forbids. So it's really about the freedom of association of the private entity vs the many users' freedom of speech on the publicly-accessible platform that is willingly provided by the private entity.
This echoes the thought of treating platforms as something akin to a common carrier. Common carriers were not forced to deliver goods, but when they did offer the service then their ability to deny delivery was limited.
ISPs are, or at least were, treated as common carriers. And aside from the fact that data is stored on servers, platforms are functionally identical. They deliver data from users to users. In fact, ISPs regularly store data as well, primarily for caching and especially for P2P traffic.
So in theory, if platforms get treated as something akin to a common carrier, then the ability to curate can be limited. The only problem is defining those limits, which in my mind should be strictly technical (spam, bots, egregiously off-topic or egregiously-wrongly categorized/tagged discussion, etc). It should be less about whether the private entity finds the content objectionable or not.
But again, this would be better handled by an act of Congress than an EO to the FCC, nevermind the inevitable 1A challenge.
Am I wrong thinking this?
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4472368 times)