The ruling and order from Doughty, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, are the latest developments in a long-running lawsuit spearheaded by Republican-led states alleging that the administration pressured social media companies to remove posts containing purported misinformation about the coronavirus, election security and other issues.
To me this means that that Court is saying that say- the Surgeon General- cant tell Facebook, etc that that post about the covid vaccine making you magnetic is a Big Fat Lie.
Which is- afaik - their actual duty.
Each topic “suppressed” was a conservative view, which “is quite telling,” Doughty declared. But in reality- spreading misinformation and lies is not- in any way shape or form- a “conservative” view. In fact just the opposite.
What sounds unconstitutional? The government asking e.g. TwitFace to take down some deliberate misinformation, or this kudge telling the governmenet they can’t make that request?
One might wonder if Judge Doughty is aware that misinformation and disinformation of the kind that he seems to like so much is at the core of most of America’s political and social problems. Whether he’s aware that it’s a plague that is rapidly leading it into something more akin to the Dark Ages than to an enlightened evidence-based society.
No, of course he isn’t, because Doughty – a quintessential good ol’ boy from Louisiana if ever there was one – is a practitioner of disinformation himself. In 2021, at the peak of the COVID pandemic, he issued an injunction blocking federal vaccine mandates for health care workers, quoting a fraudster essentially saying that vaccines don’t work. The following year, he put young children at risk by blocking federal vaccine and mask mandates for workers in the “Head Start” pre-K programs.
This is not about Freeze Peach and never was; this is about empowering right-wing fascists to wage war on truth.
I think (IANAL) that there are two cases that apply.
That first case established that when speech causes a “clear and present danger”, the First Amendment doesn’t protect it.
But then later…
That overturned the first case, and said that speech was protected unless it “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
Telling people the election was stolen or telling them that vaccines kill people aren’t examples of speech that meet the exception in Brandenburg, so the government probably is overstepping in asking that such things be removed from social media.
Now, I disagree, I believe that speech which is extremely likely to cause harm should not be protected and is using the First Amendment as a club to beat the country to death. That’s just my personal opinion. The SCOTUS seems to disagree with me (recently and in ‘69) but I think their rulings are harmful.
But if Trump wins the election next year, they will be good tools to reduce the damage to what Trump calls the enemy of the people, and what I still want to be able to read, in 2025 and beyond.
In my personal view, lecture classes, in typical schools of chiropractic, are extremely likely to cause harm. But this should be countered with discussion and evidence, not suppression.
I have no problem with this by itself:
But it has to be an attack on the content, not the platform.
OK, we all know that the conservatives are just whining because they got wrists slapped for lying. What seems far more important to me is that the judge granted them a preliminary injunction that effectively states that the U.S. federal government is not allowed to do its job unless it involves “national security threats, criminal activity or voter suppression,” according to the Washington Post. (None of those terms are in the decision itself.)
Why a preliminary injunction? That should only be given when there is firm evidence that future harm of the same nature by the Defendants is likely. Does the government even admit that they did anything against the First Amendment? Not at all.
The Defendants argue the Federal Government promoted necessary and
responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by a deadly pandemic and hostile foreign assaults on critical election infrastructure. They further contend that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in social-media companies changing their rules in order to fight related disinformation. Finally, Defendants argue the social-media companies’ desire to make money from advertisers resulted in change to their efforts to combat disinformation.
All this is hand-waved away by the decision. First, the government is obviously guilty. Second, reading between the lines though he comes pretty close to saying it out loud, the right-wingers are so likely to keep on lying about stuff that the government is sure to do it again.
Oh, BTW, the request for a class action declaration was so irretrievably junky that he threw every bit of it out.
I’ll be fascinated to see what the lawyers make of this. I understand that the federal government is powerful. Mere pressure from the government can force action even if no formal proceedings are taken. Previous Republican administrations have used this power against liberals. I don’t want another Nixon free to declare war on half the population.
Still. A preliminary injection saying the government cannot perform a wide variety of unspecified actions in the normal process of doing its job is beyond belief. Is there any precedent for this at all?
And that itself is disinformation. The vaccine didn’t stop transmission, and it didn’t stop infection. Its primary function was to prevent severe sickness that would lead to hospitalization or death.
There was plenty of pandemic among the vaccinated, and the unvaccinated weren’t putting others at more risk. They were hurting themselves.
The problem with policing ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ is that you often don’t see it on your own side, and see it too often on the other, mistaking opinion or mistakes for misinformation.
Joe Biden is a misinformation machine. He lies casually and easily with a lifetime of practice. I would trust him to police disinformation about as much as I’d trust Bill Clinton to behave himself on Intern Island.
I certainly is unconstitutional for the administration, any administration, to try and influence free speech or freedom of the press, which includes the internet. It is covered under the 1st amendment. Doesn’t matter if you don’t like the message, doesn’t matter if the message is wrong, false, or a lie. It is protected.
The unvaccinated were/are putting others at more risk.
An unvaccinated person who is infected with COVID-19 poses a much greater risk to others who are also unvaccinated. But vaccines are not 100% effective, so there is a chance that an unvaccinated person could infect a vaccinated person — particularly the vulnerable, such as elderly and immunocompromised individuals.
“Some who argue that vaccination is solely a matter of individual choice would say that you can choose to protect yourself. If you’re vaccinated, why do you care if others around you aren’t?” the professors wrote. “But again, consider the analogy: Three out of every eight people killed are not the intoxicated driver, but their passengers or people in other vehicles. Similarly, with covid-19, the risk is borne not only by the person making the decision but also by others who cross their path.”
“The vaccine is simultaneously like a great seat belt and a choice to drive sober,” they added. “The seat belt reduces your chance of severe injury in an accident. Driving sober reduces the risk of the accident in the first place. The vaccine does both, but it still matters if you’re surrounded by reckless drivers. No vaccine is 100 percent effective, and the more virus is around us — in this case, carried by the unvaccinated, who are five times more likely to be infected and thus to spread coronavirus — the more likely the vaccinated are to become infected.”
Although I trust his appointees more than you do, I think speech policing mistaken.
And, even more, I wouldn’t trust the orange-haired man, I expect to be the next president of the United States, to police disinformation.
I have no problem with the surgeon general issuing a statement saying that the widely held controversial idea in your post is biologically implausible (as it is even if the evidence summarized earlier in this thread has weaknesses – I haven’t studied it). But that surgeon general statement shouldn’t include the idea that you should be thrown off SDMB. Whether the Biden administration really does that kind of thing will affect my ultimate opinion concerning the Missouri v. Biden judgment.
Vaccine skepticism, like claims of election fraud, are commonplace opinions in many countries, now and in the past. I much doubt that sending letters to newspapers or web sites, asking them to not publish the claims, would reduce misinformation.
The actually effective way to save lives was to require the vaccines, at least in sub-populations such as those working in health care facilities. The Supreme Court has twice ruled that mandatory vaccination is constitutional.
That’s not the argument. The argument is that the message is dangerous. That should not be protected speech.
I do somewhat agree that lying about the election shouldn’t be prohibited. I hate it but any harm is indirect. On the other hand, telling people not to get vaccinated, or to use some harmful alternative medicine that can itself kill a person, that shouldn’t be protected, because it literally kills people.
It is the very essence of the First Amendment that anyone is allowed to influence the press. And the administration in power cannot, by nature of being in power, avoid influencing the press.
The administration is/ was merely asking social media sites to consider removing misinformation. Pointing it out and requesting moderators to take a look at it. They (social media platforms) have always been perfectly well within their rights to say, “Nah, fam, we good.”
I would hope that the idea that deliberately lying should not be allowed is uncontroversial.
It’s not so much in the idea of “lying should be prohibited” it’s more a case of defining and then policing what is a lie, what is opinion, and what is an unpopular idea that cannot be/is not yet proven.
I am perfectly okay with proven, verifiably untrue statements being removed from public consumption. What I am not ok with is giving a faceless govt functionary, who could be wrong, biased or themselves dishonest the power to decide what is true or a fact, and what is not, which is where the policing of lies would fall over
And it is not just a matter of facelessness. A censorship bureaucracy has a leadership chain, and the top of the chain will have a face, in the U.S., that is roughly half the time Democratic, and the rest of the time Republican. Even though the Republican is, in recent years, less to be trusted as a fact adjudicator, the Democrat cannot be trusted as a fact checker either.
Also, even well-founded scientific principles are tentative. While a lot of what we know about COVID is so well-founded that it’s almost inconceivable it will be overturned, borderline setting is subject to error. As a result, you can’t censor quackery without squashing some legitimate inquiry.
Alternative medicine practitioners who tell patients vaccines are oversold, and don’t vaccinate themselves, should neither be paid with government funds nor included with private insurance. Considering that 35 million Americans go to chiropractors alone annually, and chiropractic is founded on opposition to the germ theory, this would be big. Medical practitioners cannot understand mistakes in their ideas when they are getting well paid for believing and spreading them. Taking away alternative medicine funding would be a more effective and free-speech-consistent way to reduce the transmission of quack medical theories than the government trying to keep them off of Facebook.