Since when did the New York Times transform into a satire site? (Oh, let’s not always see the same hands …)
In fairness, when these cases challenging state laws impacting social-media operations first emerged, it did look like a challenge to a supposed laissez-faire policy enshrined in Section 230. This NYT curtain-raiser on a Supreme Court debate whether to hear appeals on these Texas and Florida laws ignores all sorts of recent reporting on that mirage, however. Emphasis mine:
Now the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider those rules, potentially leading to the most significant reset of the doctrines governing online speech since U.S. officials and courts decided to apply few regulations to the web in the 1990s.
On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms from liability for the content posted by their users.
The cases could eventually alter the hands-off legal position that the United States has largely taken toward online speech, potentially upending the businesses of TikTok, Twitter, Snap and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
“It’s a moment when everything might change,” said Daphne Keller, a former lawyer for Google who directs a program at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.
The United States has “largely taken” a “hands-off legal position … toward online speech”? Pardon me while I catch my breath:
Are they kidding?
Perhaps as leading examples of mainstream-media journalism, their willful refusal to cover the Twitter Files has left them a bit ignorant of the actual policies followed by the United States government to online content. Not only are its executive-branch national-security agencies actively censoring speech and quashing debate and dissent, occasionally members of Congress get in on the Big Brother approach to social-media censorship too. As the Twitter Files amply demonstrate, that’s less of an advisory partnership and more in lines of governmental diktats, especially after Congress hauled the then-owners of those platforms into hearings after the 2016 election and accused them of helping out the Russians by letting Americans speak their minds.
Was that an early example of the United States’ “hands off legal approach”?
Today, of course, we see yet another example of the federal government’s actual policy toward social media in Reason’s exposure of a small portion of Facebook’s correspondence with the feds — the CDC. Far from being “hands off,” the CDC drove Facebook’s moderation actions on issues that were outside of its mission and even outside its authority. They monitored and pressed to remove criticism of Anthony Fauci, even when the NIAID director contradicted himself on masks. The CDC even attempted to shut down discussion of the origins of COVID-19, even though it has absolutely no bearing on their work on fighting the spread of the disease, and even though that question still has never been answered — not even to the satisfaction of the World Health Organization.
And we have yet to see Facebook’s correspondence with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as members of Congress such as Adam Schiff. All of those entities leaned hard on Twitter to censor and remove what they deemed as “disinformation,” but which had the effect of censoring debate and dissent. Does anyone believe for a moment that their very-much-hands-on policy toward Twitter was duplicated at Facebook?
That doesn’t make the legal issues around the laws in Texas and Florida any less worthy of debate. Do states really have jurisdiction over interstate communications, let alone that which takes place on international platforms? Probably not, but let’s not just accept the idea that this is simply an attempt by these states to change a “hands-off” policy. Both Texas and Florida took the step of passing these laws to prevent censorship of dissenting points of view, which had become an obvious practice on social-media platforms even before we knew that the federal government was behind those efforts.
In other words, the NYT narrative is not just laughable, but it’s a distortion of demonstrated reality. It’s yet another reason why consumers don’t trust establishment mouthpieces like the NYT and others.
Still, I’d guess that the Supreme Court will look skeptically on the claims of jurisdiction by these states. This is clearly interstate commerce, over which the Constitution grants jurisdiction to the federal government rather than the states. What’s really needed is statutes forbidding executive branches from interfering with speech and debate on these platforms. Maybe a Republican-controlled House will push that as a top priority — which it certainly should be.
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