Two judges gave Texas control over Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
vox.comMy real problem with this whole law is that it's a lame and run around that will be difficult to enforce. Sure it may be enforced on big personalities who have lots of followers who can then get cut off for curtailed but that does not help the average person.
Instead what they should have done is picked a reasonable size of active users or some other measure and instead of preventing banning of accounts or silencing the speech they should require that the company's policies must be cited in detail for their actions.
For example if Facebook decides that your post should be deleted it must send you the exact portion of their terms of service that you have violated and cite the specific examples of your post that violate those terms of service. There should also be a means of redress or correction available. This way we can see exactly how these companies are censoring people and what their logic and reasoning is and we can tell if that violates pre-existing rights of people. The exact same thing should apply to a ban they must site in detail the actions that you took and the policies that you violated instead of the nebulous violated our terms of service that we don't have to tell you why.
What people fail to understand is terms of service are not a blanket this company can do anything. Any terms of service that are against the law are meaningless such as provisions in a contract that violate the law those provisions hold no power. But when they enforce this they never tell you what you did or why you did it.
This law is just a joke typical paid politicians that are ignoring root problems.
Like how these sites have blocklists in China/Russia/other countries, what if they provide an "allow-list" for content in Texas? So stuff gets flagged / banned as usual, except in Texas the bans don't apply.
If they really want to they could require users go through many hoops to prove they're in Texas, and then add things like latency issues, so that they "technically" comply with the ruling but not really. Kind of like what Apple does with their App Store (not latency but other stuff, like allowing dating apps in Sweden to use custom payment, making custom payment have all these requirements, etc.)
Bonus points for ensuring that the front page gets filled with spam, because that's what you get with "zero censorship". Even though artificially down-weighing content isn't the same as censoring it. Oh, and they also secretly unlist the conservative content the bill actually aims to protect anyways.
> the front page gets filled with spam, because that's what you get with "zero censorship".
Commercial messages are not entitled to the same protections as political opinions, so no one is asking for "zero censorship".
I suppose a law can't force social media companies to filter spam and make their front pages bearable to read, but if your suggestion is that they should maliciously comply by unnecessarily and deliberately ruining their own services for people in Texas, then they could just as well not offer the services to people in Texas at all, which would achieve the same result and be cheaper.
Im really wondering about the 'or else' here. There is no great firewall of texas and best they can do is seize servers located there. Supreme court i guess?
Facebook will be off that list soon
Damn, we might have to deal with opinions we don't like. Whatever will we do?
How about we start with not allowing states to blatantly ignore the First Amendment?
What if I told you that SCOTUS has previously acknowledged that corporate (negative) speech deserves less protection than citizen (positive) political speech?
This is why state governments can require that companies put warning labels or nutritional information on their products, which would otherwise be considered compelled speech.
A manufacturer can choose what types of products it won't manufacture. Why can't a publisher choose the types of work it won't publish?
Because the publisher is choosing to publish based on the identity or opinions of the customer.
To give another controversial example, there's a difference between a manufacturer choosing not to produce customized cakes, and a manufacturer choosing not to produce cakes customized for interracial couples.
By negative do you mean the freedom to not say things? Aren’t tax returns and 10-Qs compelled speech too?