The UpFirst newsletter: News from the Gaza cease-fire and how the State of the Art has threatened to silence extremists in the U.S.
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There is a chance of a deal for a temporary cease-fire in Gaza that would allow for the exchange of hostages. Jake Sullivan, White House national security adviser, said that representatives of Israel, the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar agreed on the basic outline of a deal last week in Paris. The next stage of negotiations will be held in Qatar. Benjamin Netanyahu will not stop a military assault on the Gaza Strip despite protests from the U.S.
Florida and Texas have passed laws that prevent the large platforms from banning users for their political views, and give individual explanations about why their posts have been edited or removed.
Kara Swisher: What she’s been up to during the tech shutdown and what she thinks about her business, or how she feels about her job
The government is shut down for a second time. Legislators are supposed to pass laws to keep the government running by the end of September. They have been unable to come up with a new spending plan. Federal funding for several departments, including the Transportation, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, runs out at the end of the week. The congressional lawmakers are expected to host the President tomorrow to negotiate before the Friday deadline.
The portion of our conversation that was broadcast was a long one. But a few minutes didn’t capture the full flavor. So we have also published a longer version. Think of it as the full Kara: she details her views on the tech world and her disappointments with it.
Swisher wrote a memoir about covering the technology industry for more than three decades. She writes that she went from asking tech leaders what they were thinking to telling them what she thought of their business. She’s not happy with many of them.
Why do people use social media to attack free speech? The tale of Sunita Kumari Chaudhary and Tharu craftswomen
The Himalayan mountains are plagued by waste left by mountaineering activities over the years. Nepal’s Department of Tourism estimates that there are nearly 140,000 tons of waste on Mt. Everest alone. The government began an initiative in 2019 to clean up the mountains. Some of the waste from the mountains has found its way to Tharu craftswomen, who are using traditional skills to make something entirely new from it.
See photos of how Sunita Kumari Chaudhary and her fellow crafters change trash into art and read about their fledgling effort to repurpose mountain waste into economic opportunity for their community.
“There is nothing more Orwellian than the government trying to dictate what viewpoints are distributed in the name of free expression,” said Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group for the social media companies that’s involved in the litigation. “And that’s what’s at issue in this case.”
The fight got worse after the siege on the U.S. Capitol when social media sites stopped Donald Trump from using their platforms.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made a statement at the bill signing that freedom of speech was under attack. “There is a dangerous movement by some social media companies to silence conservative ideas and values. This is against the law and we will not allow it in Texas.
Guidelines and terms of use are necessary to make sure that a community isn’t polluted. “And that’s everything from posting dog pictures in the cat forum to barbeque in the vegan forum to far more serious things like trying to groom children in a children’s site.”
The First Amendment and the Supreme Court: A Case Study of Facebook and the Miami Herald v Tornillo, Florida Social Media Sites
John is the executive director of the Rutherford Institute. Whitehead, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the cases, said the big social media sites have become the center of people’s lives and they should not be engaging in any censorship.
Whitehead said that it was out there to make people think. “In other words, you can disagree. If someone puts something foolish on, let’s say, Facebook, people should respond immediately and start a debate. Debating is the key, not eliminating.”
Other allies of Texas and Florida argue the sites are merely hosting content, not making editorial judgments that deserve lots of First Amendment protection.
Szabo said everyone should oppose government control of speech. “Because as it may be your person in the White House today, we know that that will not be forever. And that’s why the First Amendment is so important and so paramount.”
Is this place like a bookstore or newspaper where you can get the highest level of First Amendment protection?
The social media giants are relying in part on a 1974 Supreme Court case, Miami Herald v Tornillo. Florida tried to force the newspaper to carry op-eds it didn’t want to publish. The high court sided with the Herald back then.
Florida is attempting to make the big social media platforms print every single letter to the editor. Users don’t want that and neither do advertisers, they said.
Social Media for Social Lobbyists: What Social Media Users Really Want to Know About a Black Hole, the New Zealand Mosque Shooter, and the United Nations
The two trade associations — Netchoice and CCIA — are backed by groups across the political spectrum, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Americans For Prosperity, which is linked to Charles Koch, to the American Civil Liberties Union.
A group of national security experts chimed in. Rupa Bhattacharyya is a former Justice Department lawyer and special master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection is located at Georgetown University Law Center.
On an average day, 95 million pictures are posted on social media sites, including 34 million videos on TikTok. Some go viral, most don’t. And some percentage — the numbers are unclear — are taken down for violating the content rules set by the platforms. Given the volume of posts and videos, it is no exaggeration to say that the rules for social media have become the most important speech regulations on the planet, policing what can and cannot be said online.
Home-grown extremists like the Proud Boys and foreign groups like the Islamic State have deployed social media to attract converts and broadcast violence. The Christchurch mosque shooter in New Zealand live-streamed his activities, to try to inspire others, she added.
Bhattacharyya believes social media should face regulations for anti-fraud and consumer protection. There are flaws in the current content moderation policies of some big sites.
Their court papers cited hateful speech and threats against the justices. Those things are deleted now by the moderations, they said. But under the state laws, they might face lawsuits for yanking “trolls” who flood their chats with vulgar and racist posts.
It is important to understand what the tech companies are asking for. Even if you only see search results and not your personal data, moving and sorting information is how TikTok and Instagram do their work. Any sort of blocking or sorting of speech is an “editing” conduct, according to the tech giants. Even if the justices buy this argument, they would be giving constitutional protection to almost all of a social media platform’s actions, putting it beyond the control of lawmakers who want to restrict them. Doing so would give the framers of the Constitution a hard time and make it hard for them to imagine that they intended it.