Trump's Executive Order Could Ruin the Internet Over a Twitter Beef
(... like a true wannabee dictator - none will question me. Ha, that's what Stephen Miller said way back, none will question the president. These guys reek of Nazism.)
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/935yz3/donald-trump-executive-order-twitter-social-media?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=curated_vice_daily_1023202
On Thursday, the White House said, Donald Trump will fire back in what is essentially a deeply personal and petty fight with an executive order from the highest office in the land. The order, a draft of which was circulated on Wednesday night by content moderation expert Kate Klonick seeks to clarify section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to remove liability protection for digital communications services if they restrict content in a way that is "deceptive," "pretextual," inconsistent with the platform's terms of service, or if it has been done without adequate notice or explanation, or without a "meaningful opportunity to be heard."
Section 230 is a bedrock piece of internet legislation that allows service providers to engage in "Good Samaritan" blocking and screening of content that it deems to be lewd, harassing, or just distasteful in some way, even if it is constitutionally protected speech. As far as legislation goes, the first subsection of 230 is concise and powerful: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
In the order, Trump also makes the argument that social media companies' actions should not "infringe on protected speech," which would be a massive change from Section 230 as it's currently worded, which makes an explicit carve-out for restricting protected speech. This will, unequivocally, change the internet as a whole and make it worse. Straight-up neo-Nazi propaganda might be constitutionally protected speech, for example, but social media companies currently regularly remove such content. Right now, those people simply congregate on the platforms that do choose to leave such content up, and they do exist. If all protected speech was allowed on all platforms, it would get very ugly very quickly.
Daphne Keller, of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, annotated a copy of the order on Google Docs. In her annotation, Keller notes that much of the order is, in her mind, legally dubious, outright posturing, or politically motivated. Other parts could drastically change how the internet works. For example, the order invokes the First Amendment; she worries that the order attempts to put all First Amendment-protected speech on a level footing (i.e., that it attempts to limit what speech platforms can moderate). "If this really means that *all* First Amendment-permitted speech must be given equal footing on major platforms, this is a radical proposition," she wrote. "It would change the Internet as we know it, and undermine calls to remove widely reviled material like the Christchurch massacre video."
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Net Neutrality, gone?
Way way way too much porn and minors not really protected from it?
Way way way too much spidering/selling people's data without consent?
Just 3 off the top of my head.
