Some critics of the injunction against the U.S. government using social media to suppress constitutionally protected speech actually have a problem with the Constitution itself.
Some Critics of the Ruling Against Biden's Censorship by Proxy Have a Beef With the 1st Amendment Itself | Reason | Jacob Sullum:
July 12, 2023 - "Some critics of last week's preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, which bars federal officials from encouraging social media platforms to suppress constitutionally protected speech, reject the premise that such contacts amount to government-directed censorship. Other critics, especially researchers who focus on 'disinformation' and hate speech, pretty much concede that point but see nothing troubling about it. From their perspective, the problem is that complying with the First Amendment means tolerating inaccurate, misleading, and hateful speech that endangers public health, democracy, and social harmony.
"The day after Terry Doughty, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, issued the injunction, The New York Times gave voice to those [latter] concerns in a piece headlined 'Disinformation Researchers Fret About Fallout From Judge's Order.' According to the subhead, those researchers 'said a restriction on government interaction with social media companies could impede efforts to curb false claims about vaccines and voter fraud'....
"'Most misinformation or disinformation that violates social platforms' policies is flagged by researchers, nonprofits, or people and software at the platforms themselves,' the Times notes. But 'academics and anti-disinformation organizations often complained that platforms were unresponsive to their concerns.'
The paper reinforces that point with a quote from Viktorya Vilk, director for digital safety and free expression (!) at PEN America: 'Platforms are very good at ignoring civil society organizations and our requests for help or requests for information or escalation of individual cases. They are less comfortable ignoring the government.'
"The reason social media companies are 'less comfortable ignoring the government,' of course, is that it exercises coercive power over them and could use that power to punish them for failing to censor speech it considers dangerous. In the 155-page opinion laying out the reasoning behind his injunction, Doughty ... cites myriad communications that show administration officials expected platforms to promptly comply with the government's censorship 'requests,' which they typically did, and repeatedly complained when companies were less than fully cooperative. He emphasizes how keen Facebook et al. were to assuage President Joe Biden's anger at moderation practices that he said were "killing people'.... As the fretful researchers quoted by the Times see it, that is all as it should be....
"The Times paraphrases Bond Benton, an associate communication professor at Montclair State University, who worries that Doughty's ruling 'carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech.' As usual, the Times glides over disputes about what qualifies as 'misinformation,' which according to the Biden administration includes truthful content that it considers misleading or unhelpful. But since even a demonstrably false assertion 'qualifies as speech' under the First Amendment, the 'message' that troubles Benton is an accurate statement of constitutional law. That does not mean platforms cannot decide for themselves what content they are willing to host, but it does mean the government should not try to dictate such decisions....
"In an interview with the Times, Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, complained that the U.S. takes 'a 'particularly fangless' approach to dangerous content compared with places like Australia and the European Union.' Those comparisons are telling. Australia's Online Safety Act empowers regulators to order removal of 'illegal and restricted content'.... Internet service providers that do not comply with complaint-triggered takedown orders within 24 hours are subject to civil penalties.... Freedom House notes that Australia's law includes 'no requirement for the eSafety Commissioner to give reasons for removal notices and provides no opportunity for users to respond to complaints'.... Australia's scheme plainly restricts or prohibits speech that would be constitutionally protected in the United States.
"Likewise the European Union's Digital Services Act, which covers 'illegal content,' a category that is defined broadly to include anything that runs afoul of a member nation's speech restrictions. E.U. countries such as France and Germany prohibit several types of speech that are covered by the First Amendment.... These are the models that Ahmed thinks the U.S. should be following.... Critics like Ahmed, in short, do not merely object to Doughty's legal analysis; they have a beef with the First Amendment itself, which allows Americans to express all sorts of potentially objectionable opinions. If you value that freedom, you probably consider it a virtue of the American legal system. But if your priority is eliminating 'hate and disinformation,' the First Amendment is, at best, an inconvenient obstacle."
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