> The implications are fairly dramatic if this is legitimate and were to be adopted / executed.
Can anyone give a tl;dr of what the implications actually are? Maybe I'm just tired, but I'm having a hard time parsing what this would actually do (beyond soothe Trump's feelings after getting called out by Twitter).
It would make them legally liable for the content posted on their sites. Today they can claim that they aren’t responsible for it, the posters are. If they are operating in an editorial capacity, that shield is removed.
sorry to see you downvoted. People can disagree with your opinion but it is encouraging a debate.
there is no god-given right for these companies to become monopolies.
If this were to pass, it could break the monopolies:
Decision 1: they choose to stop all moderation
Out come 1: Advertisers ditch them because of all the objectionable content that will surely come.
Decision 2: They choose to moderate, and take on the liability
Outcome 2: Growing bigger becomes more costly and companies fall to some optimal 'Chandra Limit'
Hacker News has active moderation and would be effectively illegal to operate if you made websites that practice moderation legally responsible for any illegal content posted by their users.
If you really believe this is the right path to go down you should stop being a hypocrite and delete your HN account since you clearly believe HN has no right to exist in its current form.
Moderation by the users themselves could work, but that might not toe the line that HN wants to showcase (but may have to accept if they don't want to get sued and keep it running). On other platforms, advertiser may have to incentivize (monetarily or otherwise) users to post the kind of USG they want their ads nearby (assuming they still want to advertise on the platform).
I dont really understand US law, but isnt this just a statement of executive branch policy. Wouldn't this not affect the ability of private parties to sue? They were always able to use any argument they felt made sense.
I think on reading it again, you're correct. If 230c is challenged again and reinterpreted by the Supreme Court then maybe. On reading some of the recent cases and circuit court decisions on things like "failure to warn" maybe this entire legislation will be reworked in the next Congress. It probably needs some clarification.
The twitter link above does a good job. Two most important things that stuck out to me is:
1. Platform vs Publisher. Alleges Twitter's fact checks to be editorial content, and thus does not benefit from platform protections. Ditto for other large tech companies.
2. Agencies need to review sites they advertise on and report on items including "viewpoint-based speech restrictions", and restrict funding if it is not "appropriate" for that agency's speech. Presumably a way to force companies to be friendlier to the sort of politics of the person who is making the report.
- Unless they stop calling out Trump, they lose Section 230 protections. Section 230 is what allows a platform like Twitter or Hacker News to do limited good-faith moderation and not be deemed editorially responsible for every piece of nonsense someone tweets/posts that they don't get around to moderating. Without it, you either have to moderate heavily and get everything right, or not moderate at all. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati... - pre-Section 230, CompuServe did no moderation and was ruled not responsible for libelous user comments, and Prodigy did and was ruled responsible for something they failed to moderate, and people went "Wait a second, this seems like the opposite of what we want.") The executive order says, roughly, that the behavior Trump doesn't like isn't permissible under Section 230 and makes you editorially responsible for everything, so if you enjoy your Section 230 protections, you can't do that.
- The executive branch is discouraged from spending funds (i.e., buying ads) on platform that Trump doesn't like.
- The FTC will go after these platforms for unfair trade practices.
- The US attorney general will team up with state attorney generals to see if there's any state laws they can wield against these platforms too.
I think bringing back the CompuServe model would be a good thing. I remember the discussions being unusually free at the time, but was not aware that there was legal reasoning that enforced that freedom.
There's nothing prohibiting you from running a forum on the CompuServe model today - Section 230 permits a forum operator to moderate but does not require them to do so.
There are less-moderated forums out there, but they see less popular in the free market. I think the main argument for Section 230 is it made no sense to legally require the CompuServe model - both CompuServe and Prodigy should have been free to operate as they were doing.
It may be a harm to society to allow things to happen as they have been, though -- platforms started out as reasonably free, with only the most egregious content removed, used this freedom to develop a moat, and then are gradually restricting more and more content, while retaining their moat.
primarily, just seems like the government's pulling the 230 protections offered online platforms "safe harbor" for their user's actions. presumably this opens up twitter to all sorts of liability, such as when a user uploads copyrighted or illegal materials. not an internet lawyer or anything but that's my take.
> Can anyone give a tl;dr of what the implications actually are?
Were it allowed to be executed, the biggest implication is that the US has become an executive dictatorship where the laws adopted by Congress can be rewritten at whim by the executive (under the pretext of “clarification” that is 180° opposed to both the text and the actual intent of the law demonstrated by the legislative history), and the Constitutional order and structure of government is a dead letter, which absolutely dwarfs any policy implications.
> I don’t remember the left up in arms about President Obama’s EOs
I don't remember Obama issuing an EO directing agencies to issue “clarifying” regulations directly opposed to the text and clearly documented intent of the underlying statute (much less doing so for the express purpose of obstructing private actors exercise of free speech rights in direct retaliation for them not remaining silent about the falsity of Administration claims while actively relaying Administration propaganda containing false claims.) But that's neither here nor there, as I also do remember the left opposing a number of Obama’s executive actions on Constitutional and policy grounds.
(Obama was no great friend of the left, being from the center-right—like all Democratic presidential nominees since at least Clinton, during whose tenure the center-right wing took dominant control of the party).
I mean if you think "left" means outright communism, I guess President Obama wasn't quite that far over, but he was certainly not "center" or "center-right" either.
DACA wasn't an executive order by the President but a memo from the Director of Homeland Security, and didn't involve issuing “clarifying” regulation in an attempt to reinterpret the law, only a decision about how to apply the widely recognized executive prerogative of prosecutorial discretion.
> I mean if you think "left" means outright communism
You are badly mistaken if you think there is nothing to the left of pro-corporate neoliberalism besides “outright communism”. Every Democratic Presidential nominee since Clinton has been a center-right corporate neoliberal that, policy wise, would have fit reasonably well into the moderate wing of the Republican Party (which, to be fair, overlapped in the center-right with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, which wasn't dominant prior to that point) up until the rightward shift the Republican Party took to differentiate itself after Clinton was elected on a basically Republican economic platform.
Ok, it was an "executive branch memorandum", which has exactly the same effect as an EO. It directed the executive branch to ignore federal law and refuse to prosecute everyone in a specific category of illegal immigrant. You can argue that it was just an exercise of "prosecutorial discretion", but the courts don't agree with you as they've refused to allow the current administration to rescind it. In fact, one might argue the courts have actually taken that "memorandum" and turned it into irrevocable law.
The Republican Party has shifted hard left in the last twenty years, the Democrat party most certainly has not shifted right. Many Republicans in the Senate (and probably most of the house) could credibly just change to Democrats and nobody would even know the difference, and that's because the Republican Party has totally abandoned its roots. There are a few outspoken outliers, of course, but there has been essentially no actual conservative anything in the US since Reagan. JFK would never win the nomination as a Democrat today (for that matter neither would Bill Clinton), he'd have to run as a Republican as he would be considered far too conservative.
I remember Reagan, I'm guessing you don't beyond whatever caricatures your college professors sold you on, and you're looking at this solely through the lens of "oh my god the country isn't liberal enough", as most people on the left do. Reading your comment history tells me that's where this discussion is going and I won't bother to participate further.
Without even digging up a list, just the most offensive couple actions I can remember:
1. 2015 "Waters of the United States" (WOTUS) rule, which grabbed federal control over private property which happened to sometimes drain into a US coastal water or into a navigable US river
2. 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Department of Education, that denied due process to students who were accused
Can anyone give a tl;dr of what the implications actually are? Maybe I'm just tired, but I'm having a hard time parsing what this would actually do (beyond soothe Trump's feelings after getting called out by Twitter).