Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?

[Bob Jones V]

Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?

How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

www.theatlantic.com

I saw this on another site. It is a really intriguing article. .

Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.
...

To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this la

 

[AverageJoe]

Say it ain't so!

 

[ALAYMAN]

I'm conflicted on this one. There is a huge power struggle right now over the flow of information and how to propagandize the easily manipulated populous, particularly through social media outlets and platforms. I am a very libertarian leaning individual but I fear we're about to lose our democracy because of the way that low IQ voters become such suckers through digital disinformation.

 

[Ekklesian]

It depends upon how much a service has become integral to societal function on whether or not they can be prohibited from restricting the protected freedoms of those who utilize them.

Like the phone companies.

Antitrust laws begin to apply, too.

 

[AverageJoe]

I'm conflicted on this one. There is a huge power struggle right now over the flow of information and how to propagandize the easily manipulated populous, particularly through social media outlets and platforms. I am a very libertarian leaning individual but I fear we're about to lose our democracy because of the way that low IQ voters become such suckers through digital disinformation.

Sorry, ALAY..but, we're not a "democracy." We'll lose our "REPUBLIC." I lean SOMEHWHAT libertarian, but I wouldn't vote that way unless they had a truly viable candidate. Now as far as the struggle that's going on over the freedom on the internet, I say if you are posting on a site that is on the stock market, even if it's owned/controlled mostly by one party/individual like Meta/Facebook....if you want to post on their site, then you've got to put up with their BS in censorship. Yet, you can call them out for being fascists! If they don't like it, let them ban you! If you don't like it, don't post on their platform. Simple, isn't it?

 

[Dr. Huk-N-Duck]

Sorry, ALAY..but, we're not a "democracy." We'll lose our "REPUBLIC." I lean SOMEHWHAT libertarian, but I wouldn't vote that way unless they had a truly viable candidate. Now as far as the struggle that's going on over the freedom on the internet, I say if you are posting on a site that is on the stock market, even if it's owned/controlled mostly by one party/individual like Meta/Facebook....if you want to post on their site, then you've got to put up with their BS in censorship. Yet, you can call them out for being fascists! If they don't like it, let them ban you! If you don't like it, don't post on their platform. Simple, isn't it?

I agree. I actually quit using social media years ago because I saw too many people being fired from their jobs for posting pretty innocuous stuff that upset snowflakes. Then there was also privacy concerns, and of course, then there’s also the fact that I really don’t care what some lady I haven’t seen in 20 years fed her kid for breakfast.

 

[Ransom]

I wonder what the overlap is between

• on the one hand, people who think this Texas law is a bad idea because of its chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of Internet providers; and
• on the other hand, people who cry foul when YouTube bans a creator who questions the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, or Twitter bans a user for "misgendering" Rachel Levine.

If you believe the former, you can't consistently argue the latter on the basis that a major social media service is a platform rather than a publisher (with the first being a viewpoint neutral service, and the latter having its own editorial policy that it adheres to).

If you believe the latter, you can't really argue for the former, because it's that sort of law that protects individual users' freedom of expression from being squelched by the Internet corporations because they disagree with those individuals' viewpoints.

 

[AverageJoe]

I agree. I actually quit using social media years ago because I saw too many people being fired from their jobs for posting pretty innocuous stuff that upset snowflakes. Then there was also privacy concerns, and of course, then there’s also the fact that I really don’t care what some lady I haven’t seen in 20 years fed her kid for breakfast.

The only reason I am still on it is that many of my relatives are, and it's the fastest way to get ahold of them since they all would rather discuss things on the internet than on the phone. They don't seem to like personal interaction. UGH! Technology sometimes is a two-edged sword.