10 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. The benefit of decentralized moderation is that it can satisfy both thosethose that want to speak and those that don’t want to listen. By empoweringusers, through their choice of instance, to avoid content they find objection-able, the Fediverse operationalizes the principle that freedom of speech is notthe same as freedom of reach

      Decentralized moderation satisfies freedom to speak and freedom not to listen

  2. Nov 2022
    1. “There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by surrogate,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit. “It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.”

      Censorship by surrogate

      Is the government using private corporations to censor the speech of Americans?

  3. May 2022
    1. We're not currently seeing a debate about "free speech". What we're actually witnessing is just a debate about who controls the norms of a social network, and who gets free promotion from that network.

      Private Social Space

      The First Amendment ("free speech") guides what speech the government can control. The social networks are private companies, so the control is over who gets to say what in that private, social space. Is there an analog about who gets to say what in a bar...is it the bar owner? (The bar being an example of another public, social space.)

  4. Jan 2022
    1. We’re not a place—it’s very difficult to come to Xbox Live and say, ‘Okay, I want to go create a political party on the platform’. You could kind of twist the tools and try to get there, but it’s just not set up for general-purpose conversations or community.

      My Xbox 360 display picture is a Libertarian Party one created by the Xbox team for a past election cycle. They had them for GOP and Dem as well.

      There are also a few groups centered around politics for coordinating gameplay together premised on a common interest - so it seems that to that extent he doesn't know his own system?

      I don't know that Xbox as a social platform would be favorable for "creating a political party" whatever that means. Government's control what political parties are created - they only allow the ones they approve of to exist anyway.

  5. Aug 2021
    1. The First Amendment precludes lawmakers from forcing platforms to take down many kinds of dangerous user speech, including medical and political misinformation.

      Compare social media with the newspaper business from this perspective.

      People joined social media not knowing the end effects, but now don't have a choice of platform after-the-fact. Social platforms accelerate the disinformation using algorithms.

      Because there is choice amongst newspapers, people can easily move and if they'd subscribed to a racist fringe newspaper, they could easily end their subscription and go somewhere else. This is patently not the case for any social media. There's a high hidden personal cost for connectivity that isn't taken into account. The government needs to regulate this and not the speech portion.

      Social media should be considered a common carrier and considered as such. It was an easier and more logical process in the telephone, electricity and other areas to force this as the cost of implementation for them was magnitudes of order higher. The data formats and storage for social should be standardized (potentially even in three or more formats) and that should be the common carrier imposed. Would this properly skirt the First Amendment issues?

    2. Francis Fukuyama has called "middleware": content-curation services that could give users more control over the material they see on internet platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.
  6. Sep 2018
  7. Feb 2018
    1. “These are unprecedented, brazen acts of censorship by a corporate monopoly that controls a primary channel of public communication,” said Nehlen, who’s running against Ryan in the GOP congressional primaries in Wisconsin. “It has severely compromised the integrity of our election processes, and Congress needs to hold public hearings and conduct a full investigation into these matters without delay.”

      This language is ripe for studying.

  8. Sep 2017
  9. Sep 2014
    1. What level of knowledge of rap and understanding of its complicated conventions is a defendant-speaker to assume, in advance of communication, that a hypothetically reasonable person possesses in order to properly understand a rap message? Because the answer is anything but clear and because a speaker’s First Amendment rights should not hang on what amounts to guesswork about an audience’s hypothetically reasonable knowledge of a complex artistic and political genre of expression, the actual subjective intent of the defendant-speaker must be considered in both the First Amendment and statutory true threats analyses.