"...Former president and one-time Constitutional professor Barack Obama’s take on censorship: “the constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet.”
There it is – the legality of exercising one’s freedom of speech may not necessarily be p…
"...Former president and one-time Constitutional professor Barack Obama’s take on censorship: “the constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet.”
There it is – the legality of exercising one’s freedom of speech may not necessarily be protected, depending upon how it is transmitted..."
Obama wrote the first part. The second part is your interpretive framing.
“The constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet” is merely a statement of indisputable fact. The Internet has impacts on aspects of free expression that were undreamt of at the time that the Bill of Rights was written.
Consider the fact that it's possible to manipulate the ideal of free expression on the Internet in order to silence dissent and effectively censor dialogue simply by hogging bandwidth in forums like these, where the absence or lack of effective moderation (i.e., "censorship") is intended to provide an open and level playing field for the free play of ideas. The reality of the situation is that an organized swarm of axe-grinders could easily divert the topic of discussion here to their preferred subject, and then push their point of view with a Pavlovian level of repetition that leaves no room for their views to be challenged or refuted. By "no room", I mean physical room- a deluge of monomanical comments can fill up the screen to the point where no one else can get a word in edgewise. For that matter, it would be entirely possible for one nihilistic antisocial personality to simply cut and paste entire books into the story comments here, and there's really no way to stop them other than censorship.
That's just one low-tech example. When we begin to consider stuff like deepfake imagery and phishing scams using duplicated webpages, the implications for abuse of "free expression" within the "context of the Internet" get even more thorny.
One thing you are highlighting is that there is always an imaginable limit-pushing that could justify a censorship-like response. We already have limits on “free speech”: fighting words; child pornography; yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; just to name a few. We have civil punishments for libel and slander, including by news organizations, albeit with stricter limitations.
So, if this society (or the movers and shakers of it at least) for some reason start to fear that instability of the enterprise is at stake by having the citizens at each other’s throats on the internet, other exceptions will be added to free speech.
Second, the internet at its base is an infrastructure that just passes digital packets around. There are at least two issues regarding censorship: can you have access to push your platform or user packets ; and can you as a user actually engage a private platform or that is hosted on the infrastructure?
Most of the worry seems to be the second of these two issues. Are you entitled to post your opinions on Twitter or Facebook? Are they obligated to let you? Are they permitted to filter or block your access or ban you based on their own criteria?
Despite what many, mostly self-described conservative complainants have said, the law, specifically Section 230 of the CDA, not only allows but encourages platforms to filter out posts that may be considered “offensive” and it doesn’t specify what that means. It is up to the owners to make their own rules. No “neutrality” of any kind is mandated by that law, only “good faith”, another vague term. Sorry, but most of what people think is required in terms of political neutrality is a wish, not a reality. It is really not hard to find and read the law and verify this. I expect to be accused of being a snowflake censor, but so be it.
The 1st Amendment only prohibits government from making laws that abridge your speech. It doesn’t mandate that you be provided with bullhorn at someone else’s expense. We are a society that believes in something called “fairness”, but that leads many to believe that the Bill of Rights requires a lot more than it really does.
The internet complicates it and there are all kinds of algorithm excuses and what not. But the big tech companies are overtly putting their finger on the scale. WHO is going to be the arbiter of truth? Most of the censoring is done to conservatives so I can't see Obama complaining. That's something they threw in there because they lost. Another reason. But I just de-activated Facebook. People need to communicate in other ways. Social media is a nightmare and probably the worst thing that happened to human discourse anyway.
I'm thankful that there's more to the Internet news media than Facebook, and more to Internet discourse than Twitter. I participate in neither one. And frankly, their management decisions don't worry me overly much.
It was always clear to me that the Facebook news feed works as a reducing valve that's engineered to tell people only what they want to hear, as if they were monarchs pampered by a retinue of sycophantic courtiers. I could never quite get to do that.
And even with the character count doubled from 140 to 280 characters, Twitter is like something for fifth-graders. Yet the users continue to express bewilderment when their pithy three-sentence observations are misinterpreted or misunderstood, sometimes spiraling into acrimonious exchanges for pages on end...
Whether one believes him or not, Jack Dorsey justifies his attempts to place limits on posts and user access as being necessary to ensure that there is wide participation by posters without fear of intimidation through online threats. If done judiciously, the level of legitimate freedom of speech can be increased over an anything-goes approach.
"...Former president and one-time Constitutional professor Barack Obama’s take on censorship: “the constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet.”
There it is – the legality of exercising one’s freedom of speech may not necessarily be protected, depending upon how it is transmitted..."
Obama wrote the first part. The second part is your interpretive framing.
“The constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet” is merely a statement of indisputable fact. The Internet has impacts on aspects of free expression that were undreamt of at the time that the Bill of Rights was written.
Consider the fact that it's possible to manipulate the ideal of free expression on the Internet in order to silence dissent and effectively censor dialogue simply by hogging bandwidth in forums like these, where the absence or lack of effective moderation (i.e., "censorship") is intended to provide an open and level playing field for the free play of ideas. The reality of the situation is that an organized swarm of axe-grinders could easily divert the topic of discussion here to their preferred subject, and then push their point of view with a Pavlovian level of repetition that leaves no room for their views to be challenged or refuted. By "no room", I mean physical room- a deluge of monomanical comments can fill up the screen to the point where no one else can get a word in edgewise. For that matter, it would be entirely possible for one nihilistic antisocial personality to simply cut and paste entire books into the story comments here, and there's really no way to stop them other than censorship.
That's just one low-tech example. When we begin to consider stuff like deepfake imagery and phishing scams using duplicated webpages, the implications for abuse of "free expression" within the "context of the Internet" get even more thorny.
One thing you are highlighting is that there is always an imaginable limit-pushing that could justify a censorship-like response. We already have limits on “free speech”: fighting words; child pornography; yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; just to name a few. We have civil punishments for libel and slander, including by news organizations, albeit with stricter limitations.
So, if this society (or the movers and shakers of it at least) for some reason start to fear that instability of the enterprise is at stake by having the citizens at each other’s throats on the internet, other exceptions will be added to free speech.
Second, the internet at its base is an infrastructure that just passes digital packets around. There are at least two issues regarding censorship: can you have access to push your platform or user packets ; and can you as a user actually engage a private platform or that is hosted on the infrastructure?
Most of the worry seems to be the second of these two issues. Are you entitled to post your opinions on Twitter or Facebook? Are they obligated to let you? Are they permitted to filter or block your access or ban you based on their own criteria?
Despite what many, mostly self-described conservative complainants have said, the law, specifically Section 230 of the CDA, not only allows but encourages platforms to filter out posts that may be considered “offensive” and it doesn’t specify what that means. It is up to the owners to make their own rules. No “neutrality” of any kind is mandated by that law, only “good faith”, another vague term. Sorry, but most of what people think is required in terms of political neutrality is a wish, not a reality. It is really not hard to find and read the law and verify this. I expect to be accused of being a snowflake censor, but so be it.
The 1st Amendment only prohibits government from making laws that abridge your speech. It doesn’t mandate that you be provided with bullhorn at someone else’s expense. We are a society that believes in something called “fairness”, but that leads many to believe that the Bill of Rights requires a lot more than it really does.
The internet complicates it and there are all kinds of algorithm excuses and what not. But the big tech companies are overtly putting their finger on the scale. WHO is going to be the arbiter of truth? Most of the censoring is done to conservatives so I can't see Obama complaining. That's something they threw in there because they lost. Another reason. But I just de-activated Facebook. People need to communicate in other ways. Social media is a nightmare and probably the worst thing that happened to human discourse anyway.
I'm thankful that there's more to the Internet news media than Facebook, and more to Internet discourse than Twitter. I participate in neither one. And frankly, their management decisions don't worry me overly much.
It was always clear to me that the Facebook news feed works as a reducing valve that's engineered to tell people only what they want to hear, as if they were monarchs pampered by a retinue of sycophantic courtiers. I could never quite get to do that.
And even with the character count doubled from 140 to 280 characters, Twitter is like something for fifth-graders. Yet the users continue to express bewilderment when their pithy three-sentence observations are misinterpreted or misunderstood, sometimes spiraling into acrimonious exchanges for pages on end...
Yes, this is true! I
Whether one believes him or not, Jack Dorsey justifies his attempts to place limits on posts and user access as being necessary to ensure that there is wide participation by posters without fear of intimidation through online threats. If done judiciously, the level of legitimate freedom of speech can be increased over an anything-goes approach.