Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is calling on other tech companies to ban more sites like InfoWars, and says the survival of American democracy depends on it.

“Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it,” Murphy tweeted Monday.


In an earlier tweet, Murphy reasoned that private companies “shouldn’t knowingly spread lies and hate.”


[Opinion: Facebook, Apple, and YouTube banned Alex Jones for 'hate speech' and here's why the First Amendment doesn't apply]

Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Spotify removed Alex Jones and his InfoWars show from their platforms in recent days, citing violations of their codes of conduct relating to hate speech.

Apple deleted all episodes for five of InfoWars’ six podcasts, including the popular "Alex Jones Show" podcast, which was hosted by Jones, a prominent conspiracy theorist.

Facebook made a similar move by taking down four InfoWars pages after originally removing only certain videos it said violated its hate speech and bullying policies. Jones was previously suspended from the social media platform for 30 days.

YouTube also removed Jones’ channel from the platform.

“They’re invading the First Amendment,” Jones responded.

Link

On the other side of the coin, New Poll: 43% of Republicans Want to Give Trump the Power to Shut Down Media.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/...r-to-shut-down-media


Freedom of the press may be guaranteed in the Constitution. But a plurality of Republicans want to give President Trump the authority to close down certain news outlets, according to a new public opinion survey conducted by Ipsos and provided exclusively to The Daily Beast.

The findings present a sobering picture for the fourth estate, with respondents showing diminished trust in the media and increased support for punitive measures against its members. They also illustrate the extent to which Trump’s anti-press drumbeat has shaped public opinion about the role the media plays in covering his administration.

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.

Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

But swaths of self-identified Democrats and Independents supported anti-press positions as well. According to the survey, 12 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of Independents agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior” (74 percent and 55 percent, respectively, disagreed). Additionally, 12 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Independents agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (74 percent and 50 percent, respectively, disagreed)


The concept of an enemy press corps has become a staple of Trump’s tweets and public utterances in recent months. Much of it appears prompted by stories about internal frictions within the White House and a growing fear over the state of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

Members of the press, as well as top officials at some of the nation’s leading publications, have objected to the phrase, arguing that it is both wildly inaccurate and deeply dangerous. They have pointed to mob-like treatment of the media by Trump supporters at various rallies as evidence for their fears. Offered the opportunity, Trump’s spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, declined to denounce the phrase. Other Trump supports have insisted that he was merely referring to those outlets that spread false information.

National Review
Jonah Goldberg

I am very grateful for David French’s essay in the Times today, because it cuts the Gordian knot of my own thinking about Alex Jones.

David writes:

There are reasons to be deeply concerned that the tech companies banned Alex Jones. In short, the problem isn’t exactly what they did, it’s why they did it.

Rather than applying objective standards that resonate with American law and American traditions of respect for free speech and the marketplace of ideas, the companies applied subjective standards that are subject to considerable abuse. Apple said it “does not tolerate hate speech.” Facebook accused Mr. Jones of violating policies against “glorifying violence” or using “dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” YouTube accused Mr. Jones of violating policies against “hate speech and harassment.”

David’s alternative: Use the standards already enshrined in law and custom, specifically prohibitions against libel and slander.

I have always been more sympathetic to what people call “censorship” than most of my colleagues on the right (though my views have changed a bit over the last 16 years). I certainly have no problem with private entities — including corporations such as Google and Apple, but also every journalistic enterprise — using their own judgment about what kind of speech they will publish or associate with.

National Review, I am very confident, would never dream of running an essay by Alex Jones, because he’s an execrable troll who monetizes paranoia and fear-mongering with a stunning disregard for the truth or basic decency (he’s also not a conservative). At the same time, we have an absolute right to run an essay by him if we chose to.

But part of the problem is that platforms such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. operate almost like public utilities. Indeed that’s one of the ironies about the battle lines drawn over Alex Jones. As a broad generalization, the people who loved net neutrality, precisely because they want the Internet to be like a public utility, cheered Big Internet for banning Jones from its platforms. Meanwhile, many of the people who hated net neutrality were outraged by the idea that private companies could “censor” voices they didn’t like. A real public utility can’t deny services to customers just because it doesn’t like what they say or think.

One of the reasons I didn’t like net neutrality is that when you treat private enterprises like corporatist partners of the state, they become corporatist partners of the state. I don’t want the government to be invested in any private business for a host of reasons, not least among them: because the state will never stop attaching more strings to their symbiotic relationship. Another reason: Such public-private partnerships are problematic in any economic realm, but they are particularly pernicious when issues of political speech are involved. Also: They are inherently monopolistic insofar as the state becomes invested in the entities it controls and seeks to protect them from the creative destruction of the market. I want to live in a country where Google and Facebook can be rendered obsolete by something better, without the state rushing to their rescue.

David’s proposal cuts through the problem by eliminating the “eye of the beholder” problem that is inherent to banning hate speech or “hate speech” (i.e., stuff woke activists just don’t want to hear). Forbidding demagogues the freedom to lie and slander on their platforms is a viewpoint-neutral solution that still protects the autonomy of private entities. It’s defensible in court and in the court of public opinion. And it would still lead to the same outcome in the case of Alex Jones, which would be a drawback for his defenders but a boon to the rest of us.

Link

And Senator Warner is also proposing sweeping changes to the internet.

Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans For Government Takeover Of The Internet

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...nt-takeover-internet

A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news.

To save American trust in "our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets," it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into online press and markets, including "comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation" of the sort enacted in the E.U.

Titled "Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms," the draft policy paper - penned by Sen. Mark Warner and leaked by an unknown source to Axios - the paper starts out by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including when "the Soviets tried to spread 'fake news' denigrating Martin Luther King" (here he fails to mention that the Americans in charge at the time did the same). But NOW IT'S DIFFERENT, because technology.

Today's tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation techniques," Warner opines. And the ones to come, he assures us, will be even worse.

Here's how Warner is suggesting we deal:

Mandatory location verification. The paper suggests forcing social media platforms to authenticate and disclose the geographic origin of all user accounts or posts.

Mandatory identity verification: The paper suggests forcing social media and tech platforms to authenticate user identities and only allow "authentic" accounts ("inauthentic accounts not only pose threats to our democratic process...but undermine the integrity of digital markets"), with "failure to appropriately address inauthentic account activity" punishable as "a violation of both SEC disclosure rules and/or Section 5 of the [Federal Trade Commission] Act."

Bot labeling: Warner's paper suggests forcing companies to somehow label bots or be penalized (no word from Warner on how this is remotely feasible)

Define popular tech as "essential facilities." These would be subject to all sorts of heightened rules and controls, says the paper, offering Google Maps as an example of the kinds of apps or platforms that might count. "The law would not mandate that a dominant provider offer the serve for free," writes Warner. "Rather, it would be required to offer it on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" provided by the government.

Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online political speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity threats, more funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a requirement that companies' algorithms can be audited by the feds (and this data shared with universities and others), and a requirement of "interoperability between dominant platforms."

The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a certain size must turn over internal data and processes to "independent public interest researchers" so they can identify potential "public health/addiction effects, anti-competitive behavior, radicalization," scams, "user propagated misinformation," and harassment - data that could be used to "inform actions by regulators or Congress."

And - of course - these include further revisions to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, recently amended by Congress to exclude protections for prostitution-related content. A revision to Section 230 could provide the ability for users to demand takedowns of certain sorts of content and hold platforms liable if they don't abide, it says, while admitting that "attempting to distinguish between true disinformation and legitimate satire could prove difficult."

"The proposals in the paper are wide ranging and in some cases even politically impossible, and raise almost as many questions as they try to answer," suggested Mathew Ingram, putting it very mildly at the Columbia Journalism Review.

PDF of the proposal can be seen here:

https://graphics.axios.com/pdf...tformPolicyPaper.pdf

Murphy has already proven himself to be a magnum caliber idiot.

One problem is these are not private companies that just decided the didn't like Jones. They were under intense political pressure and the threat of government action. Thus their actions become an extension of the state.

One possible solution is to treat them like public accommodations, similar to hotels and restaurants that can't discriminate against people due to race. But with the added protection that censoring otherwise legal speech would be a civil rights violation.

quote:

‘Survival of our democracy Democrats’ depends on banning sites like InfoWars, Dem senator says

Fixed it for him.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
On the other side of the coin, New Poll: 43% of Republicans Want to Give Trump the Power to Shut Down Media.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/...r-to-shut-down-media


Freedom of the press may be guaranteed in the Constitution. But a plurality of Republicans want to give President Trump the authority to close down certain news outlets, according to a new public opinion survey conducted by Ipsos and provided exclusively to The Daily Beast.

The findings present a sobering picture for the fourth estate, with respondents showing diminished trust in the media and increased support for punitive measures against its members. They also illustrate the extent to which Trump’s anti-press drumbeat has shaped public opinion about the role the media plays in covering his administration.

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.

Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

But swaths of self-identified Democrats and Independents supported anti-press positions as well. According to the survey, 12 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of Independents agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior” (74 percent and 55 percent, respectively, disagreed). Additionally, 12 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Independents agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (74 percent and 50 percent, respectively, disagreed)


The concept of an enemy press corps has become a staple of Trump’s tweets and public utterances in recent months. Much of it appears prompted by stories about internal frictions within the White House and a growing fear over the state of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

Members of the press, as well as top officials at some of the nation’s leading publications, have objected to the phrase, arguing that it is both wildly inaccurate and deeply dangerous. They have pointed to mob-like treatment of the media by Trump supporters at various rallies as evidence for their fears. Offered the opportunity, Trump’s spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, declined to denounce the phrase. Other Trump supports have insisted that he was merely referring to those outlets that spread false information.

The President is never going to have the authority to close down a news outlet, and the President who thinks that might be a good idea needs to go to stupid study.

Thinking the press is the enemy of the people is free speech. Shutting down a news outlet isn’t.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
The President is never going to have the authority to close down a news outlet, and the President who thinks that might be a good idea needs to go to stupid study.

Thinking the press is the enemy of the people is free speech. Shutting down a news outlet isn’t.

The point is to illustrate that wackos are everywhere, not just on one side.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
The President is never going to have the authority to close down a news outlet, and the President who thinks that might be a good idea needs to go to stupid study.

Thinking the press is the enemy of the people is free speech. Shutting down a news outlet isn’t.

The point is to illustrate that wackos are everywhere, not just on one side.

Yes. But the GDC wackos are actually successful in shutting down opposing voices.

Gordian knot is a good description for me too.

In a case involving the Pruneyard Shopping Center, the California Supreme Court as upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States recognized that where the public is invited to private property but the space is a “functional public square”, citizens are entitled to free speech rights – at least in California.

In Pruneyard, the shopping center had a commercial interest in having the public gather to purchase products. But that interest was overcome as the shopping center tried to exclude people based on the content of their speech.

In the current instances of social media, the public is invited to have a place to share and communicate. The media platforms get paid on the fact that people gather regardless of whether the public buys anything at all.

Consequently, it looks like social media platforms are actually designed to be “functional public squares” by asking people to join and talk. If so, one would think that free discourse – especially on political issues – should be had.

Although, if we left social media with no way to police speech, very few people would probably want to gather there. Things like 4chan and 8chan and underground sites have uninhibited free speech but a quick glance shows why some moderation or discipline is desirable.

Hate speech is a leftist/European construct that has no meaningful bounds. It seems to me that our social media sites should not use unbounded hate speech as a measure of the limits of American free speech. Hate speech is not illegal.

Facebook, for instance, is trying to make rules to satisfy English censorship laws while trying to block political and religious speech in China. For freedom-loving Americans, our robust, expansive edges of free speech should govern the limits of what Americans should enjoy. Such is indispensable to ordered liberty.

Free speech is not safe. Free speech often offends. But, free speech lets us correct ourselves and enlighten others – especially in our political discussions.

Facebook wanted to start its own “supreme court” to find the edges of free speech. No thanks. Kids and progressives acting out social justice indoctrination should not be empowered with such important issues.

The standards should be the same for all Americans and we already have a long history of Supreme Court of The United States decisions examining what the founders meant as free speech in a successful, free society. It seems to me that subjecting Facebook and others to litigation as something akin to “functional public squares” would better guide censorship in social media.

I had forgotten about the Pruneyard Shopping Center case.

The wiki has a clear explanation.

quote:

In American constitutional law, this case is famous for its role in establishing two important rules:

under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers

under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights


This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.[3] The Pruneyard case, therefore, raised the question of whether an implied right of free speech could arise under a state constitution without conflicting with the federal Constitution. In answering yes to that question, the Court rejected the shopping center's argument that California's broader free speech right amounted to a "taking" of the shopping center under federal constitutional law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...ing_Center_v._Robins

Several nuances here.

George Mason is spinning in his grave at Gunston Hall so fast the vibration is registering 3.5 on the Richter scale, worse even than the Mineral, VA earthquake.

I'd like to see Senator Warner gone. He was the voice of reason among Virginia's senators (the other is Tim Kaine) but has been utterly corrupted.

The ideas expressed in the opinions cited in this thread are down right terrifying. These are the very type of ideas that presaged every societal disaster in the 19th and 20th centuries.

JALLEN,

Yea. I didn't want to go through the nuances because it would have obscured the point.

Facebook's principal office is Menlo Park, Californa so they would seemingly be under the rule set out in the Pruneyard case.

Of course, the other part is that states cannot provide less than the constitutional rights found by the Supreme Court of the United States.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
The President is never going to have the authority to close down a news outlet, and the President who thinks that might be a good idea needs to go to stupid study.

Thinking the press is the enemy of the people is free speech. Shutting down a news outlet isn’t.

The point is to illustrate that wackos are everywhere, not just on one side.

Yes. But the GDC wackos are actually successful in shutting down opposing voices.

Whose fault is that?

The Case for Banning Alex Jones

Weekly Standard
JONATHAN V. LAST

There's no reason for conservatives to be defending this guy.

One of the downstream effects of Trumpism is that the fact of having a President Trump has given conservatives a hair-trigger on defending every marginal figure, no matter how stupid or malicious. It’s easy to understand why: Trump is close to these people in form and substance, so allowing them to be attacked can be seen as a proxy argument against Trump. No conservatives would have felt duty-bound to defend Milo Yiannopoulos had Mitt Romney been president.

But we are where we are, so various conservatives have risen to defend Alex Jones in the wake of Facebook, YouTube, and Apple kicking him off of their platforms. Their defenses come across three vectors, each of which is flawed.

(1) It’s a First Amendment issue. Let’s dispense with this one off the top: No, it’s not. And conservatives used to understand the difference between having the right to say something and having the right to say something without consequences.

None of the tech companies that have de-platformed Jones are impinging on his right to speech. He can still record and disseminate podcasts and videos. He can still publish whatever conspiracy theories he wants. No one is threatening him with violence or jail or a fine or denying him a license to carry on as he pleases. No arm of government touches this case in any way.

All that is happening is that privately owned companies are declining to allow him to use their resources to broadcast his speech. There is no First Amendment case—none at all.

(2) It’s an equal-access issue. You might recall a couple months ago when conservatives celebrated the Masterpiece Cake Shop decision. (Rightly, in my view.) The nub of their argument was that privately held businesses ought to be allowed to refuse certain kinds of services to certain customers, provided that (1) the refusal was based on reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds and that (2) the person being refused had reasonable recourse to an alternative remedy.

That’s precisely what has happened here. Jones is being denied access based on his behavior and actions, not who or what he is. And he has an enormous, obvious, and reasonable remedy: The Internet.


Alex Jones has his own website. On it, he can publish anything he likes. He can post videos and offer podcasts. He can send out newsletters. People who want Alex Jones can get all the Alex Jones they can handle with about half a second of effort and no additional barriers. And this isn’t like a newspaper telling Jones that he’s free to buy his own printing presses and start his own paper: The total bill for publishing all of this stuff will be in the range of a several hundred dollars a year.

The platforms we’re talking about here—Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes podcasts—are nothing like public utilities. There are plenty of alternative channels and then there’s the giant World Wide Web itself, with all of the intertubes in it.

There is one case that you can envision where the utility/equal-access argument might hold: If Google decided that they were going to ban Alex Jones from search results, then Jones defenders might have a point. Google is so dominant, and search is such a core function, that it could reasonably be viewed almost as the doorway to the internet. You could make a very good case that Google Search functions like a utility.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here and even looking at Google Search in this way highlights the degree to which the entities in question are nothing like utilities.

(3) The ban is imperfect. Have you seen all of the conservatives asking “What about Farrakhan?” There are a ton of bad users out on the tech industry’s leading platforms. But saying that these platforms shouldn’t ban Alex Jones because they haven’t banned all of the bad actors is like saying that the DA shouldn’t prosecute one criminal because the police haven’t caught every other criminal.

The answer here is obvious: Tech companies shouldn’t give Jones a pass; they should get rid of the Farrakhans of the world, too. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

Conservatives who worry about the slippery slope ought to wait until we get to a part that’s actually slippery. There is nothing about Alex Jones—nothing—that would allow him to be confused with a reasonably responsible, good-faith actor. This isn’t a hard case. If you have even minimum community standards for decency, you can draw a line here.

The real question is whether or not you believe that tech companies should be allowed to impose any standards on their platforms. YouTube doesn’t allow pornography. Is that okay? Facebook doesn’t seem to allow the Daily Stormer to have a page. Does that make Facebook a worse experience for the average user?

On the base question of whether or not private companies have the right to establish some minimum standards of decency on their platforms, the conservative response has almost always been, “Yes.” (I suspect the overlap between groups that insist that Facebook must allow Alex Jones on the platform and also insist that NFL should force players to stand during the national anthem is almost 100 percent.)

But I’d go even further: The conservative view isn’t just that communities have the right to create standards—we have always believed that there is wisdom and virtue in doing so. If we didn’t, then we’d be libertarians.

There may come a time when tech companies make a bad decision regarding who they allow to use their platforms. But this isn’t that.

Maybe you think that the public square the internet has created over the last decade is healthy and optimal. If so, then banning Alex Jones is a bad idea. But if you look around online communities and think that they can, and should, be better—then the real problem is that tech companies haven’t gone far enough.

Link