On today’s internet, the boundaries of acceptable speech are set by a few massive platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and a handful of others. If those companies find something unacceptable, it can’t travel far — a restriction that’s had a massive impact for everyone from copyright violators to sex workers. At the same time, vile content that doesn’t violate platform rules can find shockingly broad audiences, leading to a chilling rise in white nationalism and violent misogyny online. After years of outcry, platforms have grown more willing to ban the worst actors online, but each ban comes with a new political fight, and companies are slow to respond in the best of circumstances. As gleeful disinformation figures like Alex Jones gain power — and the sheer scale of these platforms begins to overwhelm moderation efforts — the problems have only gotten uglier and harder to ignore. At the same time, the hard questions of moderation are only getting harder.
Wired has a good story about Texas’s attempt to make ISPs block abortion-related speech — something we’ve covered in the past.
“We’ve seen over and over in different contexts that platforms are vulnerable to censorship pressure because they’re afraid of being sued,” says Pinsof. “So it’s easier to take stuff down than it is to potentially open yourself up to liability.”
Defamation law is one of the rare limits to US speech protections, so we’re watching the outcome of voting machine company Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News closely. How are things going for Fox?
“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” wrote Judge Eric Davis in his 81-page ruling.
Not great so far.
We’ve written about the dicey legal situation around AI-generated text and images. Now, Public Knowledge’s John Bergmayer makes a thoughtful (if, given how new these tools are, I think still debatable) argument against granting Section 230 liability protections to bots like Microsoft’s new Bing:
Content that a service helps develop “in whole or in part” is outside Section 230’s scope.
Section 230 also does not allow services to use uprooted facts or data and then escape liability by saying the data came from somewhere else. It is not an “I read it on the internet so don’t blame me!” statute.
Justice Elena Kagan does a good job of summing up the big question here after the opening question from Clarence Thomas. “This was a pre-algorithm statute, and everyone is trying their best to figure out how this statute applies,” Kagan notes. “Every time anyone looks at anything on the internet, there is an algorithm involved.”
The court is hearing Gonzalez v. Google, one of the biggest tech law cases in years, at 10am ET. You can livestream the audio if you want to tune in — and we’ll have coverage of Gonzalez and its sister case Twitter v. Taamneh over the coming day and week.
[www.supremecourt.gov]
Defamation lawsuits are emerging as a popular strategy against conspiracy influencers like Alex Jones. But legal blogger Ken White has nicely broken down a much trickier case: whether a professor can sue a TikTok personality named Ashely Guillard who accused her of murder based on tarot readings.
America’s robust and exceptional protections of speech often come at the expense of actual injustice and suffering, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. This is such a case. Guillard’s behavior is morally contemptible. That doesn’t necessary solve the puzzle of whether it’s defamatory.
[popehat.substack.com]
A popular niche risks running afoul of the site’s rules against ‘sexually gratifying’ content.
In this op-ed, Yoel Roth examines why he left Twitter last week (because all decisions now lie with one person, Elon Musk) and the hellish rules about content moderation Musk will have to navigate, whether made by regulators or the planned moderation council.
But, as Roth explains, the most notable check on Elon’s “unilateral edict” and free speech platitudes may be Apple and Google:
Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun
That’s what happened last week, as Vice’s David Gilbert highlights the muted reaction to last week’s four separate drops from the mystery conspiracist. Even within the world of Qanon, the response has been muted at best.
It’s not that people are coming to their senses exactly; they’ve just stopped caring about some rando on 8kun.
Alex Jones has had lots of profiles over the years, but a new feature by Verge alumnus Joseph Flatley at Failed State Update focuses on his cult of personality and the allegedly hostile work environment at his site Infowars. Beneath those allegations, there’s a larger story about Jones’s political and social opportunism — and how it’s slowly backed him into a corner.
[Failed State Update]
