My Lawyer
I cannot imagine how I raised a child to believe that “No speech abridgin’ means no speech abridgin’.”
Mark wrote an opinion piece you might want to read. I’ll let him know to expect comments.
January 21, 2021 By: Juanita Jean Herownself Category: Uncategorized
I cannot imagine how I raised a child to believe that “No speech abridgin’ means no speech abridgin’.”
Mark wrote an opinion piece you might want to read. I’ll let him know to expect comments.
Welcome to The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.
My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
I am honored and privileged to know Miss Juanita Jean Herownself, hairdresser extraordinary and political maven. Since she does not have time to fiddle with this internet stuff, I type her website for her and you can read it if you want to. If you don't, she truly does not give a big bear's butt.
A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
This ain't a blog. Blogs are way too trendy for me. This is a professional political organization.
That’s not exactly what he said. It’s more nuanced than that. And I think he’s absolutely right.
1I find the whole platform vs. publisher argument to be somewhat fascinating, but a private company gets to decide how it navigates through these issues. I certainly can get behind a question of whether a company that considers itself a platform SHOULD censor content, but the legality is fairly cut and dried. You do not have an absolute right to tweet, post on FB, or any other platform. Now, should those companies censor content? That’s a very interesting question.
I suppose the question is whether the speech has any redeeming social qualities to it. What I’m not smart enough to figure out is whether a platform can be sued for bad acts that are inspired by the content on their platform. The little I know would seem to indicate whether they followed their own terms of service and I think that’s why the ex-president was eventually banned. As an opposing council, I’m guessing you could make a pretty compelling argument that a platform is liable if they blatantly and repeatedly do not enforce their own terms of service.
2First Amendment just like the Second; made obsolete by technology. “No speech abridgin’ means no speech abridgin’.”
What if we were to substitute amplification for the word “abridging.”
Mr. Mark Bankston to D.C. stat, please. Maybe you can drag the strict ‘constitutionalists’ into the 21st century.
3Mark wrote what a lot of people have been thinking and talking about lately. The law protecting platform companies–Facebook, Twitter, etc.–from being held liable for what users post, originally intended to promote the widespread dissemination of ideas from regular people not associated with major media, seems to be in the lawmakers’ sights.
The underlying problem is the collapse of the ad-generated news system. Should private foundations subsidize journalism? This is going to be a discussion we will all be having for the foreseeable future.
4It has been a perfect storm of free speech meeting the wide open and unaccountable world of social media where misinformation becomes fact for like minded users. After what occurred before the 2016 election, where misinformation was allowed to affect the results, the major platforms felt the public pressure and got some conscience to do something as the 2020 election approached. I don’t pretend to know the answers, but I’m glad this whole discussion is taking place. The insurrection on Jan 6th links directly back to the instant gratification people got on social media for their radical ideology. Again, I don’t know the answer, but just doing nothing got us to this place.
5I was a newspaperman for 45 years and am generally OK with just about any speech.
I dispute some of the assumed facts in Mr Bankston’s article.
1. That fake news “arose” recently. It has been around for as long as the Republic.
2. That digital platforms give wider distribution to fake news than older methods. Skipping over a bit to Fox news, on its best day it fails to reach at least 98.5% of Americans. Hearst and McCormick achieved much deeper penetration with their newspapers and magazines.
I don’t know what the figure for FB etc. is but it’s nowhere near what Hearst had.
3.That there has ever been a regular system for controlling access to platforms. When Henry Ford reprinted the Secret Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the Dearborn Independent, he required all Ford dealers to make free copies available in their showrooms.
I think it would be a good idea, from a purely business management standpoint, for platforms to clearly state their boundary.
It could be as simple as, we don’t carry Nazi stuff. Amazon does that in its online store.
I have no objection to a commission but the example of, eg, the Kerner Commission does not make me sanguine about the outcome.
6As one of those in favor of just about ANY sort of expression, and then letting things get messy and dangerous in the process of sorting things out, I have very little concern about a particular platform making a decision of what they want to allow (and when).
First Amendment law makes it abundantly clear that government deciding what is allowed is not appropriate for our Constitutional environment. It says nothing about non-governmental institutions facilitating or opposing speech. I frequent two grocery stores: come next month, one will allow Girl Scouts to set up tables and tempt the masses to buy their cookies, while the other one, if they follow the last couple of years of practice, will continue to deprive their customers of conveniently placed Thin Mints. I don’t think much of it — if I object, I can do shopping at the other.
I’m certainly not bright enough to craft a utopian answer on expression. I don’t think a Commission would be, either. If I were trying to improve the system, I think I would encourage faster court processes and helping to find and support lawyers willing to take sides in court on unpopular expression.
7I experienced a very annoying static-like buzzing, increasing in volume over the last four years. Then it stopped after the twitter ban. And here I thought it was tinnitus. There’s that.
8Dear Ms. Juanita Jean,
9You raised a smart cookie. No doubt about that. I fully agree that this is a tough one and any quick solution is liable to be a disaster for free speech rights. I think Nick @2 is on to something with making companies liable for not uniformly following their own terms of service. Let them set their own rules, but they have to follow them. Maybe that becomes a requirement for continued Section 230 protection.
Lets see now . . . Facebook et al. are social by nature, so why shouldn’t there be a darn good “social contract” in that nature somewhere, the kind of social contract that prevents the really naturally unsocial types like Proud Boys etc. from fomenting sedition and murder. With the 5 people dead from the raid on the Capitol, sedition and murder kind of go together like salt and pepper. If only for the sake of the two cops that were killed . . .
10maggie, in this brief thread, all the comments have been about a speech. As far as deaths go, wacky stuff about vaccines or medicaments has killed thousands of times more people than the 5 at the Capitol.
Why are we not concerned about that?
11Seems like social platforms are content to let everyone else worry about what the 1st Amendment means. If it were easy to sue the platforms for lies, etc, perhaps they would look for ways to keep themselves and everyone else safe.
12You cannot sue anyone for lies. It isn’t just social platforms. There are some types of dishonest statements that you can sue for but lying itself is not a crime or even a tort
13The great Jonathan Pie said many of the same things, although obscenely and hilariously. I have to disagree with both.
The First Amendment guarantees the right to speak one’s mind and no more. It doesn’t guarantee a megaphone, an adoring or at least attentive crowd, nor exemption from having one’s teeth knocked out by someone who takes strong exception to what is being said. It just means the speaker isn’t the one who will go to jail for it.
I welcome the deplatforming of DJT by all the major platforms because they provided him such easy ways to distribute his poison. They were the perfect delivery systems, aimed at everyone out there with the sites preloaded on computer browsers, as most of those browsers do these days. It was easy, just point and click and slurp up all the lies.
Pushing this stuff onto less available and less user friendly platforms like 8kun, Gab, and quarantined sub Reddits adds a layer of difficulty that most people won’t bother with and that will make a difference in the long run.
Case in point, my elderly parents in the 90s. When Limbaugh had his mercifully brief TV show, they got sucked right in and started to rant and rave. When that show got canceled and he was pushed back to radio, they lost interest, the radio was in another room or in the car and didn’t come with a remote next to the recliner chair. They became quite human again.
The same will likely be true of the vast swath of Americans who rely on formats with one click access. The worst of the worst will likely follow DJT to the less friendly places on the net. The rest will slowly begin to detox as the dosage of daily hate begins to be weaned down.
We’re going to need to start to heal as a nation, and reducing the size of the right wing megaphone is the first and very necessary step.
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