Come on, Mike: it's totally possible to have the government censor Bad Speech while preventing them from ever limiting Good Speech.
No, I didn't check the news yesterday. Why do you ask?
Bold move for a business which quite literally dependent on the 1st Amendment to run a piece saying "the 1A is bad, actually".
But then I remember that NYT ran Tom Cotton's "Send in the Troops" piece, so...
Old-line liberals are viscerally hostile to anything networked or distributed, and can't conceive of any approach to reform that involves decentralized self-governance rather than a mid-20th century industrial dinosaur model (see Frank, Thomas).
Another of that ilk is Doug Henwood, who once pigeonholed free and open-source software into the same box as "entrepreneurship" hustlers like Gingrich and Kemp.
Ironic that so many liberals who claim to hate big tech are also copyright maximalists, and support the central bulwark of big tech power.
It's extra frustrating because such an ignorant approach (e.g. re: FOSS) doesn't even have good grounding in serious liberal theory, it's just vibes + nostalgia for cold war dinosaurs.
Wu begins by saying the goal is to have a free press and then goes on to argue that the companies who publish information should be completely constrained by not being allowed to make decisions about what information they publish.
"presuming...free speech protections apply to a tech company’s “curation” of content...weakens the ability of the government to regulate so-called common carriers like railroads and airlines"
WTH does that mean? Railroads' core business is not in speech. What content would they curate?
Couple things. First, the fact that he sees NetChoice as morally equivalent to Citizens United. Second, the (IMO false) distinction he draws between human and “algorithmic” curation. Ranking and moderation are essential functions of social media, and they can do neither at scale without automation…
Small forums do both of those things as well, but don’t need automation as they operate at a smaller scale. Should human moderators be subject to neutrality requirements?
This leads to the third thing; he seems to imply that search and social media ought to be common carriers, like railroads or airlines. How can a platform rank content in an “unbiased” way subject to common carrier rules?
Short version of longer answer, there could be a regulatory environment in which the algorithms were regulated to make sure they aren't actually doing really twisted things, right now it seems like corporations have total carte blanche to do whatever, and shouldn't be impossible to separate /
I object to his takes on algorithms, corporate speech, Citizens United, US v Alvarez (the "stolen valor" case), his views on the regulation of TikTok, using "think of the children" as an excuse to regulate speech, and his mistaken opinion on "common carriers", for a start.
OK, but "think of the children" is a good excuse to regulate lead paint, whatever sort of classification as common carrier status can be swept away in a week of June, and it's reasonable to think that "speech" (normatively speaking) shouldn't include every single profit driven algo you could imagine
Lead paint has scientific backing showing harms. So far none has demonstrated a causal relationship and their main cheerleaders have mostly been Republicans wanting to censor LGBTQ content off the internet.
So if scientific research shows that TikTok causes brainrot begins to appear we can think about regulations of big tech companies? That's a start.
Also I don't think we should let what red states are fantasizing about distract us from the bigger long term threat of unregulated tech companies.
