First: This is, I think, 100% correct: Ken White: ’1. The First Amendment and Section 230 let private companies like Twitter and Facebook choose how to moderate their sites. 2. American free speech rights are exceptional and protect a very large amount of speech many of us would agree is dangerous or harmful. That broad protection helps insulate speech from political and ideological urges to censor. 3. But the government has a leadership function as well as a governing one. Part of leadership is praising good behavior and condemning bad behavior, in hopes that people will do the right thing, without the coercion of law. 4. Facebook has a right to make money off of this alarming and deadly disinformation. But that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Just as Americans have the right to say poisonous and ugly things to each other, that doesn’t make it right. 5. When Facebook is exercising its right to profit off of deadly propaganda about COVID, it’s doing the wrong moral thing. It’s being a bad citizen. The First Amendment protects it from coercion, but not from criticism—yours and ours. 6. We call on Facebook to reconsider its stance. We’ve identified common anti-scientific propaganda that puts lives at risk. Facebook can continue to profit off of it. But it can choose not to. We call on Facebook to do the right thing—for Americans and their lives.
Ken is a (sincere and personable) priest of a particular holiness -- holiness being that which must not be questioned -- that the civil power MUST NOT act to constrain speech, because this is too much power and cannot be vested in anything without the costs exceeding the benefits.
This has not always been the consensus position in the United States; leaving aside wartime censorship, you had the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting.
It's also utterly moot; the Republic has been lost. (Since no later than 2000, when the consensus cared who won, and not that the votes were counted.)
There are a couple-six systemic issues that can be pointed at, where Ken's axiom that there will necessarily and inevitably be a greater cost becomes difficult to support:
1. voter suppression; it's popular, it's widespread, and its advocacy cannot be suppressed because (in this view) the point of the First Amendment is to allow you to say "I own that guy" without penalty.
2. lethal penalties for protest; you can go look at the spate of "suicides" in Ferguson, you can look at the venerable being kicked in the head, you can look at the war crimes (tear gas is a war crime all by itself), and note that whatever right of free expression people supposedly have, it doesn't extend to advocating for anything that might result in meaningful change. (a meaningful change reduces an incumbent's profits.)
3. money is speech, and the ability of an individual to withstand the (vastly) greater force of 24/7 ideological repetition doesn't exist, any more than an individual exists able to juggle thousand kilogramme weights exits.
4. paucity of shame; the idea that shame affects a corporate is risible. The idea that shame affects a techbro billionaire isn't risible, but it's not shame as you would feel for the distress of your neighbour; it's shame at being seen to be soft or moved by anything other than the will to power. The idea that shame affects someone in a condition of ideological reinforcement is risible, too; shame works in a community by being uniform and inescapable. So long as someone can plug in to the id amplifier and be told they are righteous, shame won't work.
5. OODA loops in the permanent emergency; the weather gets worse for the next century no matter what. (Next four, probably; the point is that nothing conceivable keeps the weather from getting worse for the next hundred years.) Agriculture fully breaks; billions migrate. A slow wrangle to consensus absolutely will not work. How do you construct a right to protest or to say what you think during a species-wide exercise in handling multiple interacting emergencies?
6. the dismissal of the public sphere; the great political movement of our age is by the very wealthy who have decided that nothing able to require them to pay taxes is or can be legitimate. If you won't pay your taxes, you're not part of civil society, by definition. Extending civil society's rules to people actively engaged in insurrection -- refusal of taxes is absolutely insurrection, as any medieval monarch could tell you -- which means "to any tech bro billionaire", is obviously folly. It's widely recognized as unjust.
Whatever construction of the First Amendment -- of the generalized rights of free speech, protest, and assembly -- y'all devise, it's got to handle this stuff. What Ken describes is visibly, obviously, not the case. By the witness of the increase in the heap of corpses, COVID corpses, black corpses, native corpses, poor corpses, drowned in floods and succumbed to the heat corpses, all the corpses of the inescapable shouting mammonite consensus, strange to truth, it's failed extensively and widely.
And, yeah, it sounds nice, and hell yeah, exercise of the civil power to suppress insurrection -- that refusal of taxes is absolutely insurrection -- is terrifying.
Absent some civil power able to construct a substitute for agriculture, it remains all moot. Nobody's odds are good, but let's not go for moot. Which means getting through the suppression of the mammonites first.
Section 230 is the "safe harbor" provision that absolves liability for platforms for being responsible for content posted by individuals. media that is fully controlled by the platform does not get that right.
But, once you moderate content, that is editorial control. That should remove the need for 230. But, moderation at scale is impossible. Automated systems don't work. Human moderation is overwhelmed - it can only work at a small scale, as numerous specialty websites and news websites successfully do. FB, Twitter, Youtube, etc cannot moderate effectively because of their scale.
If we want large-scale platforms, then we must accept editorial control is impossible and therefore 230 must be in place. Having said that, there should be a way to actively prevent disinformation and to hold the platform owners figurative feet to the fire. There is far too much evidence that FB, in particular, allows disinformation as curtailing it harms their bottom line. The recent "Dirty Dozen" Covid disinformation providers have been known to FB but they were not stopped. Given the resulting unnecessary deaths, there needs to be some accountability from the company given that this was easily achievable to contain.
Should we be at war in the future, and groups use the FB to disseminate lies that would amount to treason, should not FB be held to account for allowing it, rather than making "true best effort" to censor such content? It may be hard, and it may require hiring a lot more people that cost money, but allowing FB and others to just hide behind 230 and make feeble excuses should be unacceptable in such a situation.
The original meaning of the First amendment would allow the government to take action against Facebook. The original meaning is the Federalist interpretation given to the First Amendment by the Alien & Sedition Acts. That law was passed by the Congress and Signed by the President. Jeffferson allowed the laws to expire. Any objective view of the Supreme Court of the time would conclude the Supreme Court would have upheld them. In order to alter this situation the Constitution should be amended.
Now , my personal position is the Jefferson position, but so what. I'm not losing any sleep on this issue because Constitutional Interpretation is a tangled web of historical opinions, many of which have been asinine or clearly concocted. My own view, for example, is that Roe vs Wade cannot be overturned because it's been law for quite awhile, and it would take an amendment to alter its current interpretation. But as John Randolph said long ago, the Constitution s a dead letter it's just politics.
Ken is a (sincere and personable) priest of a particular holiness -- holiness being that which must not be questioned -- that the civil power MUST NOT act to constrain speech, because this is too much power and cannot be vested in anything without the costs exceeding the benefits.
This has not always been the consensus position in the United States; leaving aside wartime censorship, you had the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting.
It's also utterly moot; the Republic has been lost. (Since no later than 2000, when the consensus cared who won, and not that the votes were counted.)
There are a couple-six systemic issues that can be pointed at, where Ken's axiom that there will necessarily and inevitably be a greater cost becomes difficult to support:
1. voter suppression; it's popular, it's widespread, and its advocacy cannot be suppressed because (in this view) the point of the First Amendment is to allow you to say "I own that guy" without penalty.
2. lethal penalties for protest; you can go look at the spate of "suicides" in Ferguson, you can look at the venerable being kicked in the head, you can look at the war crimes (tear gas is a war crime all by itself), and note that whatever right of free expression people supposedly have, it doesn't extend to advocating for anything that might result in meaningful change. (a meaningful change reduces an incumbent's profits.)
3. money is speech, and the ability of an individual to withstand the (vastly) greater force of 24/7 ideological repetition doesn't exist, any more than an individual exists able to juggle thousand kilogramme weights exits.
4. paucity of shame; the idea that shame affects a corporate is risible. The idea that shame affects a techbro billionaire isn't risible, but it's not shame as you would feel for the distress of your neighbour; it's shame at being seen to be soft or moved by anything other than the will to power. The idea that shame affects someone in a condition of ideological reinforcement is risible, too; shame works in a community by being uniform and inescapable. So long as someone can plug in to the id amplifier and be told they are righteous, shame won't work.
5. OODA loops in the permanent emergency; the weather gets worse for the next century no matter what. (Next four, probably; the point is that nothing conceivable keeps the weather from getting worse for the next hundred years.) Agriculture fully breaks; billions migrate. A slow wrangle to consensus absolutely will not work. How do you construct a right to protest or to say what you think during a species-wide exercise in handling multiple interacting emergencies?
6. the dismissal of the public sphere; the great political movement of our age is by the very wealthy who have decided that nothing able to require them to pay taxes is or can be legitimate. If you won't pay your taxes, you're not part of civil society, by definition. Extending civil society's rules to people actively engaged in insurrection -- refusal of taxes is absolutely insurrection, as any medieval monarch could tell you -- which means "to any tech bro billionaire", is obviously folly. It's widely recognized as unjust.
Whatever construction of the First Amendment -- of the generalized rights of free speech, protest, and assembly -- y'all devise, it's got to handle this stuff. What Ken describes is visibly, obviously, not the case. By the witness of the increase in the heap of corpses, COVID corpses, black corpses, native corpses, poor corpses, drowned in floods and succumbed to the heat corpses, all the corpses of the inescapable shouting mammonite consensus, strange to truth, it's failed extensively and widely.
And, yeah, it sounds nice, and hell yeah, exercise of the civil power to suppress insurrection -- that refusal of taxes is absolutely insurrection -- is terrifying.
Absent some civil power able to construct a substitute for agriculture, it remains all moot. Nobody's odds are good, but let's not go for moot. Which means getting through the suppression of the mammonites first.
Section 230 is the "safe harbor" provision that absolves liability for platforms for being responsible for content posted by individuals. media that is fully controlled by the platform does not get that right.
But, once you moderate content, that is editorial control. That should remove the need for 230. But, moderation at scale is impossible. Automated systems don't work. Human moderation is overwhelmed - it can only work at a small scale, as numerous specialty websites and news websites successfully do. FB, Twitter, Youtube, etc cannot moderate effectively because of their scale.
If we want large-scale platforms, then we must accept editorial control is impossible and therefore 230 must be in place. Having said that, there should be a way to actively prevent disinformation and to hold the platform owners figurative feet to the fire. There is far too much evidence that FB, in particular, allows disinformation as curtailing it harms their bottom line. The recent "Dirty Dozen" Covid disinformation providers have been known to FB but they were not stopped. Given the resulting unnecessary deaths, there needs to be some accountability from the company given that this was easily achievable to contain.
Should we be at war in the future, and groups use the FB to disseminate lies that would amount to treason, should not FB be held to account for allowing it, rather than making "true best effort" to censor such content? It may be hard, and it may require hiring a lot more people that cost money, but allowing FB and others to just hide behind 230 and make feeble excuses should be unacceptable in such a situation.
The original meaning of the First amendment would allow the government to take action against Facebook. The original meaning is the Federalist interpretation given to the First Amendment by the Alien & Sedition Acts. That law was passed by the Congress and Signed by the President. Jeffferson allowed the laws to expire. Any objective view of the Supreme Court of the time would conclude the Supreme Court would have upheld them. In order to alter this situation the Constitution should be amended.
Now , my personal position is the Jefferson position, but so what. I'm not losing any sleep on this issue because Constitutional Interpretation is a tangled web of historical opinions, many of which have been asinine or clearly concocted. My own view, for example, is that Roe vs Wade cannot be overturned because it's been law for quite awhile, and it would take an amendment to alter its current interpretation. But as John Randolph said long ago, the Constitution s a dead letter it's just politics.