Just before I read this article I read this one:
Nothing these assholes do anymore shocks me. Alito and Kavanaugh look like a bunch of pasty old men, and Thomas seems so unhealthy he looks like he could fall over dead any minute now. If only.
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They provide the capability to broadcast an untruth on a wide scale. If they were selling shouts into a megaphone would they be less responsible?
The wealthy have vanity newspapers and media outlets that exist solely to influence public debate. Social media amd the internet have blown the doors off whatever we can regulate.
News isn’t a vanity project anymore, and we leave ourselves open to any entity, state and otherwise, to have influence on our star-spangled ding dang megaphone, dagnabbit.
"When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not a private individual.”
But that’s precisely the point here: the Alitos of the world want to use gov’t to force private corporations to be extensions of gov’t who must facilitate, implement, encourage, promote, and behave according to their rancid KKKristofascist belief systems…and woe unto the corporation that fails to kneel, kiss the ring and comply. They’ve been catering to the oligarchy for so long they cannot see and/or are infuriated by the distinction between gov’t apparatus that they control and the corporate world they’ve spent so much time catering to as part of the plan to use plutocracy to secure white Christian power.
What’s remarkable is that the same people who have no problem with a political party in control of government discriminating against voters based on political affiliation and anticipated voting behavior in order to gerrymander themselves into permanent minority rule over a state (and by extension the country) will suddenly throw a fucking tantrum over the alleged “discrimination based on political affiliation” of a private company that runs a social media platform deciding what its TOS and EULA rules are going to be in terms of content and how it is going to interpret and enforce those rules.
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Of course. Notably, this one.
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Ken Buck just introduced a resolution demanding that the 25th Amendment be used to remove Biden.
We already knew he was a traitor, but this is some desperate fucking nonsense.
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These laws should be framed as what they are: Right to Lie Laws.
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And proud of it!
It does not apply to wedding cakes the same way. You are conflating the use of a tool for expression of a message to access to the tool itself.
Consider that most businesses in the United States are classified as public accomodations. If you run a bakery, you are not allowed to categorically refuse to serve classes of individuals like, say, Redheads. Redhead walks in and wants to buy a cake, they get to buy a cake so long as they are not screaming at you, threatening your life, etc. Now you absolutely can have a policy that says you won’t make cakes with offensive messages written on them as long as it is based on the content of the expression and applies to everyone and not who is doing the expressing.
Similarly, white supremacists can sign up for a Facebook account. It has to be open to all with certain permitted limitations (over the age of 13, etc). That’s the accommodation part. But Facebook can set rules for what you are allowed to use its tools to do as long as everyone is prohibited from writing antisemitic posts. It is regulating behavior, the expression of ideas, not access to the tools to do so.
In both cases, the private company is allowed to set rules on the content of the expression but not access to the tools of expression. Whereas government is more broadly prohibited from regulating the content of the expression itself and not just access.
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The companies would just stick a label on the T&Cs saying “not available to residents of Texas or Florida” and be done with it when they’re forced to not censor anything.
Otherwise they’ll all go down the same cesspit as xitter.
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Doesn’t Buck already have one foot out the door and been a thorn in the side of some of the Freedom Caucus’ inanities? The frog really can’t trust the scorpion…
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Justice Thomas has become quite garrulous during oral arguments, at least in comparison to the Sphinx-like character we saw in his first two decades on the bench. I almost prefer the Sphinx.
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The First Amendment says what governments can’t do. Let’s call that censorship.
But it says nothing about what private actors can do. If TPM deletes my post, that is not “censorship” whatever else you may want to call it. I have no First Amendment beef with TPM.
And I didn’t even go to Yale Law!!
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This notion that these billion+ $$$ valued companies are the “public square” is nonsense. Is the NYT the public square? Hell no. The closest thing we’ve got to public square media (as opposed to literal public squares) are what’s left of PBS and NPR–and we know how little Republicans care about them. X, Facebook, et al are not acting in the public interest, and never have been. They are acting in their own interests. This idea that they have some kind of obligation to amplify whatever shows up on their networks is so completely at odds with free market doctrine it would be funny if it weren’t so horrifying to watch these nut jobs like Alito get led around by their grievances instead of any semblance of rational thought that perhaps might have been operational in an old-school Republican CEOcon before they became Paleocon.
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You have two authoritarian ideologues, Alito and Thomas, one of whom, despite his cleverness, is much too obvious, and one of whom is just not very smart.
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Do enjoy justices who come from a legal movement that basically thinks antitust law shouldn’t exist getting upset that the concentration of power in social media is resulting in content moderation that something akin to government censorship. Maybe do something about the concentration of power that has destroyed local media?
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They want to be able to spread their hate/fear mongering unabated, with impunity. Next, they’ll go after fact-checking web publications. 
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Alito, fuming at that little punk Kavanaugh’s disrespect for his authoritah on matters Orwellian, leaning over and whispering to Kavanaugh, “Big Brother is watching you.”
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That’s no way to talk about the cat! (j/k)
Right, so wedding cakes for everyone, but no rainbows or Ken+Ken cake-toppers…
it only untruth if the individual does not believe it. we believe whatever we want to believe
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