Whether leaning on social media platforms or threatening broadcasters, federal officials of both parties have made jawboning — using government power, or the threat of it, to indirectly censor protected speech — a growing stain on American life.
>The platforms made independent decisions to moderate when they did, as is THEIR 1A right.
If you actually believe that Facebook and Google woke up one morning and out of the clear blue sky decided completely on their own, with no encouragement from the fedgov whatsoever, to consign Battacharya and Kulldorff to the bit bucket, you are such an irredeemable imbecile that it beggars the imagination you don't somehow drown when trying to brush your teeth.
>The Murthy case was a sham. Find new plaintiffs and file a better case.
Find one email making that demand. Happy to read it. I read every single deposition and filing in that case, and in the other jawboning cases. No one mentioned Bhattacharya or Kulldorff. Bhattacharya was “censored” by Twitter around the time of the Great Barrington Declaration, per his public statements. Immediately after it came out. Who was president then, remind me?
You started paying attention to platform moderation when — when Taibbi spoonfed the public a pile of BS? They had their policies in place long before any Biden administration. Hate to break it to you.
I support the bill. I also like reality and facts and think we should be clear on who did what to whom and when. Murthy was a garbage case.
As it happens, Renee, I've been paying attention to platform moderation since the Usenet days, when moderation was a decentralized effort led by newsgroup administrators and service providers -- roughly two decades before it migrated up the stack to social media platforms, at a time when you were still in fucking grammar school, and long before the Stanford Internet Observatory was a glimmer in Alex Stamos' imagination and you and the other mediocrities working there were tonguing Thom Hartmann's taint in exchange for favorable writeups in The New Republic.
Yes, social media platforms all had TOSes. And yes, most of them had gone fully woke by 2013-2014, after the Gamergate farce, and turned their "trust and safety" efforts over to a bunch of no-account Millennials without any demonstrated competence at moderating content in a principled way. As a result they got away from TOS'ing legitimate problem users who were actively disrupting their services, and instead veered into adjudicating speech that was "harmful" or "misleading" (which as a practical matter usually meant speech that was heterodox and/or disrespectful of leftist shibboleths, if not right-coded). For most of the platforms this was a feature rather than a bug, since they were led and staffed by leftists who donated heavily to leftist causes and weren't unhappy to see non-leftist speech demonetized, shadow-banned, or outright censored. So yes, they were already ideologically sympathetic to censorious bureaucrats, and there was also no small measure of throne-sniffing at play (see, e.g., the internal Twitter emails showing how important it made people like Yoel Roth and Jack Dorsey feel to be fielding calls about content moderation from the FBI).
But this idea that there was no pressure exerted at all, that the platforms all arrived at their COVID censorship policies independently and would have censored users regardless of what the fedgov did or said? It's just bullshit. We know that it's bullshit because people like Roth and Zuckerberg, who had every reason to deny it, admitted to Congress that they were pressured. You have to be a credulous buffoon to believe this, with discussions about regulating the platforms more robustly going on in the background, had zero influence over how moderation policies were devised and implemented. You have to be a credulous buffoon to believe that mistakes may have been made but Murthy was a sham case because none of the victims can satisfy a causation analysis with the mathematical precision that Justice Barrett has convinced herself is appropriate (despite that standard rendering it functionally impossible for *any* plaintiff to successfully sue the government for jawboning absent the kind of no-doubt, smoking-gun admissions that even the midwits staffing the platforms and infesting the fedgov are generally smart enough to avoid leaving a record of).
'Course, we already know you're a buffoon, Renee, given that you worked for the SIO and you think "Matt Taibbi spoonfed the public a pile of BS," both of which are mutually exclusive with liking reality and facts. Get all the way fucked.
>If the federal official did the jawboning “willfully and wantonly,” they’ll have to personally pay the damages. (Otherwise, the government will pay on their behalf.)
This right here is a flaw in the bill. *Government* isn't paying on their behalf; *taxpayers* are. And taxpayers should never, ever be on the hook for a federal official who violates someone's constitutional rights under color of law, without regard to whether the federal official acted willfully or wantonly.
Personal liability or don't bother, because otherwise the damage award is coming out of my own pocket.
Does the law override John Roberts' most notorious invention of "presidential immunity"? Because otherwise this will do nothing to stop Trump's assault on free speech.
I think it’s important that FIRE support JAWBONE while also clearly stating that Murthy was tossed because there was no evidence that the government defendants had so much as mentioned those plaintiffs. That was the standing issue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is quite blunt about the “clearly erroneous” findings of the lower court. There is a multi-paragraph long footnote about how Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, for example, were never so much as mentioned. The famous quotes by Rob Flaherty were revealed to be unrelated to issues that Schmitt et al manipulated them to appear to reference. Schmitt repeatedly lied about witness statements in the depositions. The testimonies of the tech company executives to the Weaponization Committee, which were concealed by Jordan and omitted from his reports, creating a false impression, stated that they were not coerced.
Obviously “both sides” jawbone but FIRE has a lot of reputational heft and for a time it regrettably was misled and echoed some if the egregious mischaracterizations, including false claims about purported jawboning carried out through academic intermediaries (this did not happen as subsequent evidence showed). I think readers deserve the facts.
The fact that Battacharya and Kulldorff were never specifically mentioned by name is textbook missing-the-forest-for-the-trees, which is regrettable feature of Justice Barrett's entire opinion. The case against the government required the judges to draw some reasonable inferences from the facts at hand, notwithstanding tech executives self-serving assertions that they were never coerced. The majority inexplicably refused to do so and insisted on a formalistic proof of causation that virtually no plaintiff is ever going to be able to satisfy, which effectively turns the law into a dead letter.
Within the first few weeks of any competently-delivered law school curriculum, we all learn that one of the most basic canons of statutory interpretation is that legislatures enact laws for a reason, intending them to mean something and have some effect, and judges should therefore avoid interpreting laws in ways that render them functionally inoperative. Shame that ACB, who once taught the law, forgot that lesson.
The government defendants made no requests about them and didn’t even talk about them. The platforms made independent decisions to moderate when they did, as is THEIR 1A right.
The Murthy case was a sham. Find new plaintiffs and file a better case.
Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression (JAWBONE).
I wonder how many tax-paid hours were spent to come up with this cutesie-poo name? It's hard to believe that Congress will vote to reduce its power to micromanage private businesses, but we can always hope.
>The platforms made independent decisions to moderate when they did, as is THEIR 1A right.
If you actually believe that Facebook and Google woke up one morning and out of the clear blue sky decided completely on their own, with no encouragement from the fedgov whatsoever, to consign Battacharya and Kulldorff to the bit bucket, you are such an irredeemable imbecile that it beggars the imagination you don't somehow drown when trying to brush your teeth.
>The Murthy case was a sham. Find new plaintiffs and file a better case.
Lick the boot harder, Renee.
Find one email making that demand. Happy to read it. I read every single deposition and filing in that case, and in the other jawboning cases. No one mentioned Bhattacharya or Kulldorff. Bhattacharya was “censored” by Twitter around the time of the Great Barrington Declaration, per his public statements. Immediately after it came out. Who was president then, remind me?
You started paying attention to platform moderation when — when Taibbi spoonfed the public a pile of BS? They had their policies in place long before any Biden administration. Hate to break it to you.
I support the bill. I also like reality and facts and think we should be clear on who did what to whom and when. Murthy was a garbage case.
As it happens, Renee, I've been paying attention to platform moderation since the Usenet days, when moderation was a decentralized effort led by newsgroup administrators and service providers -- roughly two decades before it migrated up the stack to social media platforms, at a time when you were still in fucking grammar school, and long before the Stanford Internet Observatory was a glimmer in Alex Stamos' imagination and you and the other mediocrities working there were tonguing Thom Hartmann's taint in exchange for favorable writeups in The New Republic.
Yes, social media platforms all had TOSes. And yes, most of them had gone fully woke by 2013-2014, after the Gamergate farce, and turned their "trust and safety" efforts over to a bunch of no-account Millennials without any demonstrated competence at moderating content in a principled way. As a result they got away from TOS'ing legitimate problem users who were actively disrupting their services, and instead veered into adjudicating speech that was "harmful" or "misleading" (which as a practical matter usually meant speech that was heterodox and/or disrespectful of leftist shibboleths, if not right-coded). For most of the platforms this was a feature rather than a bug, since they were led and staffed by leftists who donated heavily to leftist causes and weren't unhappy to see non-leftist speech demonetized, shadow-banned, or outright censored. So yes, they were already ideologically sympathetic to censorious bureaucrats, and there was also no small measure of throne-sniffing at play (see, e.g., the internal Twitter emails showing how important it made people like Yoel Roth and Jack Dorsey feel to be fielding calls about content moderation from the FBI).
But this idea that there was no pressure exerted at all, that the platforms all arrived at their COVID censorship policies independently and would have censored users regardless of what the fedgov did or said? It's just bullshit. We know that it's bullshit because people like Roth and Zuckerberg, who had every reason to deny it, admitted to Congress that they were pressured. You have to be a credulous buffoon to believe this, with discussions about regulating the platforms more robustly going on in the background, had zero influence over how moderation policies were devised and implemented. You have to be a credulous buffoon to believe that mistakes may have been made but Murthy was a sham case because none of the victims can satisfy a causation analysis with the mathematical precision that Justice Barrett has convinced herself is appropriate (despite that standard rendering it functionally impossible for *any* plaintiff to successfully sue the government for jawboning absent the kind of no-doubt, smoking-gun admissions that even the midwits staffing the platforms and infesting the fedgov are generally smart enough to avoid leaving a record of).
'Course, we already know you're a buffoon, Renee, given that you worked for the SIO and you think "Matt Taibbi spoonfed the public a pile of BS," both of which are mutually exclusive with liking reality and facts. Get all the way fucked.
Wall of text from triggered Taibbi paypig who can’t argue without resorting to personal attacks. Didn’t read.
Anyway, try again next time. ACB nailed it. They weren’t censored. Find better plaintiffs. And get some anger management help. 😂
>If the federal official did the jawboning “willfully and wantonly,” they’ll have to personally pay the damages. (Otherwise, the government will pay on their behalf.)
This right here is a flaw in the bill. *Government* isn't paying on their behalf; *taxpayers* are. And taxpayers should never, ever be on the hook for a federal official who violates someone's constitutional rights under color of law, without regard to whether the federal official acted willfully or wantonly.
Personal liability or don't bother, because otherwise the damage award is coming out of my own pocket.
Do you think we should not be able to sue our state government for damages either?
Does the law override John Roberts' most notorious invention of "presidential immunity"? Because otherwise this will do nothing to stop Trump's assault on free speech.
Why can you not write? "Is when" is not a means of definition.
Is when what?
It's now posted on govtrack! S. 4749 Give it a thumbs-up and call your congresspeople!
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s4749
AND ‘GENDER’ CRITICAL PEOPLE!!
https://suspensionreport.com/suspensions/gender
I think it’s important that FIRE support JAWBONE while also clearly stating that Murthy was tossed because there was no evidence that the government defendants had so much as mentioned those plaintiffs. That was the standing issue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is quite blunt about the “clearly erroneous” findings of the lower court. There is a multi-paragraph long footnote about how Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, for example, were never so much as mentioned. The famous quotes by Rob Flaherty were revealed to be unrelated to issues that Schmitt et al manipulated them to appear to reference. Schmitt repeatedly lied about witness statements in the depositions. The testimonies of the tech company executives to the Weaponization Committee, which were concealed by Jordan and omitted from his reports, creating a false impression, stated that they were not coerced.
Obviously “both sides” jawbone but FIRE has a lot of reputational heft and for a time it regrettably was misled and echoed some if the egregious mischaracterizations, including false claims about purported jawboning carried out through academic intermediaries (this did not happen as subsequent evidence showed). I think readers deserve the facts.
The fact that Battacharya and Kulldorff were never specifically mentioned by name is textbook missing-the-forest-for-the-trees, which is regrettable feature of Justice Barrett's entire opinion. The case against the government required the judges to draw some reasonable inferences from the facts at hand, notwithstanding tech executives self-serving assertions that they were never coerced. The majority inexplicably refused to do so and insisted on a formalistic proof of causation that virtually no plaintiff is ever going to be able to satisfy, which effectively turns the law into a dead letter.
Within the first few weeks of any competently-delivered law school curriculum, we all learn that one of the most basic canons of statutory interpretation is that legislatures enact laws for a reason, intending them to mean something and have some effect, and judges should therefore avoid interpreting laws in ways that render them functionally inoperative. Shame that ACB, who once taught the law, forgot that lesson.
The government defendants made no requests about them and didn’t even talk about them. The platforms made independent decisions to moderate when they did, as is THEIR 1A right.
The Murthy case was a sham. Find new plaintiffs and file a better case.
Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression (JAWBONE).
I wonder how many tax-paid hours were spent to come up with this cutesie-poo name? It's hard to believe that Congress will vote to reduce its power to micromanage private businesses, but we can always hope.
Congress I believe is exempt; last draft I saw applied to executive branch agencies.