Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Tuesday night that he backs President Donald Trump’s push for $2,000 direct payments for COVID-19 relief, but the senator tied his support to repealing Section 230 and whether the GOP keeps control of the Senate after the Georgia runoffs.
Yeah, bullshit. Lindsey knows that McConnell is going to quash the higher stimulus amount by adding the Section 230 stuff, and he knows the Dems in the Senate won’t support that. The House isn’t coming back to consider a new bill either.
The three of them – Trump, McConnell and Graham – are relying on the public not understanding what Section 230 actually does, and what the impact would be. Trump just wants to hurt the social media companies because they’ve been mean to him. It has nothing to do with social media “censoring conservatives.”
The consensus among respected economists, including Krugman, is that $2000 payments based on current sliding scale numbers are a poor use of this money, and that it should be more targeted towards people who really need it, with a much lower set of sliding scale numbers. I.e. relief more than stimulus. It’s probably moot though since it doesn’t look like MM’s going to allow a vote on a bill that doesn’t have poison pill provisions.
An aside, since a lot of people end up using these payments to pay down debt (what I did), aren’t they “bad” for the financial industry, since it translates into fewer finance charges collected on outstanding debt? If so, has this been reflected in finance stocks? Or are they make up the losses elsewhere?
There’s general agreement that Section 230, which was passed over 20 years ago when the internet was a much different place needs revisiting. But doing it as part of an unrelated bill, whether the Defense Authorization or COVID relief in a mad rush to get out of town, without hearings and input is exactly the wrong way to do it and will inevitably result in a mess.
...The consent
decree signed by the “Secretary”, with the consent of Kemp, is perhaps
even more poorly negotiated than the deal that John Kerry made with
Iran. Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China, and they
definitely don’t want “Trump”. So disgusting! #MAGA
There remains no
basis for Trump’s claim a sibling works for China - it’s some dude by
the same last name. But I’m sorry for spreading the inaccurate statement
that he doesn’t have a brother at all. A good reminder about the need
to double-check even things that seem verified.
OK: 1) Brad
Raffensperger does not have a brother who “works for China.” Trump was
echoing a debunked conspiracy theory. 2) Raffensperger does have *a*
brother. His staff said as recently as this morning that he only had two
sisters, but there is a bro, and another sister.
Law schools would love the repeal of 230. It would take 100,000 new attorneys to handle all the suits filed by every knucklehead alleging they were harmed or slandered by something someone else posted to various social media forums.
The point is that lots of people who aren’t suffering and don’t need it will also get the $2000, or some fraction of it, which is stimulus, not relief. A family of 4 making $250-$350k a year is NOT suffering.
Yep, and of course Trump doesn’t realize it would lead to even more censorship of user content to avoid those lawsuits.
The social media companies need more regulation, especially with regard to user data ownership, but a functioning society needs a degree of protection for the “carriers” or it gets real messy. If I can’t sue USPS for delivering a nasty letter to my mailbox, I shouldn’t be able to sue my ISP or Twitter either.