Who do I trust to issue driving licenses? Who do I trust to approve drugs? There’s a difference between arms of government that politicians have day-to-day involvement with, and agencies where politicians can face sanctions for trying to get involved with individual cases.
It’s not all one monolith.
The rest of the world exists. We have common-sense standards of journalistic integrity across most of the Western world. It doesn’t enable tyrants, quite the contrary; tyrants first need to tear up such rules or threaten the independent agencies.
The US elected Trump, then had Jan 6th, and now Trump still has a good shot of winning again, because a massive proportion of Americans passionately believe absolute nonsense. Even to the level of attempting terrorist actions on the basis of disinformation. What would need to happen to consider that maybe, just maybe, where America has drawn the line of free speech is not the sweet spot?
This is going to be almost impossible to enforce meaningfully - even in states/cities that require salary ranges , all they have to do is say $19 - $40 /hr and if no one ever gets hired at $40, you still can’t really be certain that they wouldn’t have paid a unicorn candidate $40 hr.
No matter how you spin it you are still faced with the option of a free-press (with all the bias and lies and danger that brings) or censorship under force of law.
No country on earth has the unrestricted right to say any words in any situation without risk of prosecution. To take just one example, the US still has quite broad obscenity regulation. How can we trust anyone to enforce obscenity laws? No matter how you spin it, it’s censorship. Maybe governments will manipulate such laws to shut down opposition?
I know it concerns me, like lots.
Or…maybe you can have common-sense objective standards without the sky falling? Note that at no point have I talked about opinions being blocked. I said just the opposite in fact.
I would put the fact that Americans have been trained to believe that any journalistic integrity standards at all = end of free speech = government tyranny as a primary cause of the mess that US politics are in right now.
You’d be burning down the village to save it. Section 230 applies to ALL online communication platforms, not just “Social Media”. So congratulations you just exterminated this site. And Nebula. And the World War Two channel in YouTube and every content channel, page or blog that is not hosted by the author in his own servers on his property, or by a formal news publisher, that is not backed by a corporation with a full-time legal department or better yet a couple of federal Circuit Court judges in their pocket. Because you know EVERYONE with a nit to pick will be lining up to sue EVERYBODY over ANYTHING they object to.
A certain past President liked to just casually comment that he’d like to get rid of Sec. 230 as well as that he’d want American libel laws to be more like the UK’s. Never actually did anything about it because of course it was just a vague threat, not a policy, but be careful what you wish for.
I don’t think we are actually disagreeing here, just stating the inherent difficulty in navigating this question.
Maybe, but I think that is easy to say and very hard to do. I’d be interested to know how those objective standards would be defined.
The phrase “I know it when I see it”, an open admission of subjectivity, was famously used in the supreme court in relation to those very obscenity laws you cite.
Is it government regulated to anything like the extent that is being proposed here? I don’t just mean different libel laws, I mean media outlets being required to substantiate news stories to some legal standard.
Those are (largely) non-political areas with fairly narrow opportunities for abuse (and yet, abuse still happens from time to time). It is clear that even the Supreme Court is not as immune to political influence as we had all hoped, and this country is already suffering from that discovery.
It all comes down to the fact that you can’t trust the power hungry with the power to restrict speech which is ultimately an attempt to control thought. Even when the domains are petty such as a small neighborhood with an HOA, a tiny town with a need to generate revenue, or even tiny little message boards/social media platforms/comment sections, etc. it’s not rare to find the levers of power abused. Why would we trust that institutional capture wouldn’t occur at a greater level when all evidence currently points to major institutions being captured by ideologues that are willingly blind if it advances an agenda?
So to concede to the state a fundamental liberty? It seems exceedingly foolish. Roderick_Femm has the right idea. We need to take the long term approach of improving people’s critical thinking skills and I would add the ability to respect differences.
I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks for the correction. In that case I’d get some very smart lawyers to somehow modify the existing laws to specifically target social media platforms.
Worded much better than I did. Yes, that’s my fear, and we won’t be certain that the long-established rights of expression are anachronisms until irreparable damage is done. Why are we confident that the current model best guarantees liberty? Aren’t we seeing the opposite?
You’d need more than some very smart lawyers. I mean how, exactly is the SDMB not a social media platform? Not a large enough user base? In any event, it’s much more than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s more akin to wanting to uninvent the printing press and movable type.
To paraphrase Churchill on a related issue, it’s the worst way to do things apart from all of the others. We’re so used to seeing other systems denying liberties that we often don’t even really notice or properly acknowledge them. I started to respond to this by @RitterSport earlier, but decided against it because they so obviously mean in our way of doing things that I was afraid it might come across as snarky, but to make the point:
It’s very easy to restrict this stuff, all one has to do is look at, for example, Russia’s gay propaganda law or laws against “discrediting” the armed forces. Threaten people with 15 years in jail for saying things you don’t want them to say and they’ll shut up right quick.
You’d be burning down the village and not saving it. The big platforms would survive, in one form or another–they’d impose severe restrictions and have to fight through some lawsuits, but ultimately they have enough money that they’d pull through. The SDMB and such would not. They can’t afford to fight a single lawsuit, nor are the mods going to be 100% successful in policing the posts, and they do not have the automated machine learning capabilities to take the brunt of the load. The small sites would be crushed and people would flock to the remaining big ones.
Heh, I would have more put it more modestly in the league of needing the last 100 years of all sorts of distributed infomedia development rebooted. In the 20th century fascists and communists rose to power and there was spread of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory, even before TV, in a world of print news, terrestrial radio, moviehouse newsreels and individuals making speeches and handing out leaflets in person.
Who’d then very strictly limit the range and scope of what content they allow… for their own and their investors’ interests, not necessarily the public’s.
Everything was going fine right up until that damnable Gutenberg invented that infernal means of printing, then it all went right to hell with people deciding they didn’t need the church to explain the bible to them and could read it themselves.
Point being, you can’t uninvent something, the best (and worst) you could do with social media at this point is to be heavy handed in how people use it; even countries that score low on the freedom scale have social media, even if its state owned and Facebook and Instagram are banned for extremist activities, as in Russia.
Proposed here by whom?
How it works in the countries with the kind of regulation that I am alluding to, is that it starts with a complaint being logged with the agency responsible for broadcasting standards. They investigate, and what they are investigating is simply whether the channel 1) Had good faith reasons to believe a claim 2) Corrected errors as soon as they were made aware of them 3) Didn’t engage in other bad behaviour like hounding people.
Note that it is not about what the claim was, it was about the way that they behaved.
If all this sounds too oppressive, note that it’s not that different to if MSNBC were to broadcast gratuitious video of a massacre, say.
Again, the kind of regulation that I am alluding to has nothing to do with the content of stories.
As you imagine it, I suppose not. But any enforcement of any law can be made on other than objective bases, as is only too clear to anyone who reads the Controversial Encounters Between Law Enforcement and Civilians thread. What I am arguing is that, if you open the door the policing the media, you will have no control over how that policing is done in the future.
I’m not really doubting that such exists, but I would be interested to know where, i.e. specifically which countries.
Beyond what already exists in my own jurisdiction? No, but I would extend that legal framework to the rest of the world. I don’t believe in free speech, it’s a polite fiction everywhere.
And usually advocated by the privileged at the expense of the psychic trauma of the underprivileged.
My concern about such broad laws is that corrupt authorities could use them to shut down speech against them. Do other laws in your jurisdiction protect, say, journalists from such abuses?
Truly corrupt authorities pay no heed to actual laws.
But that’s fighting the hypothetical. I’m the god-king here, and you’re not suggesting I’m corrupt, are you?
Press freedom is ultimately handled by the Constitutional Court, our highest court, and they tend to uphold it. There are challenges, especially from some particular political parties, but the impact is not overwhelming. But merely being a journalist is not going to give someone leeway to spout hate speech.
South Africa ranks above the United Kingdom and Australia in press freedom. And way above the United States. Your concern is noted, but unneeded.
