Democrats Continue To Look For Ways To Regulate Free Speech

Politico gives a platform to Steven Brill, CEO of fact check site Newsguard, one of the main people who failed to take the Hunter Biden laptop story seriously, calling it a “hoax“, hence, refusing to do the job of the news media, which is investigate. They’d rather just suppress information they do not like and can be inconvenient

How to Regulate Social Media Without Hurting Free Speech

You can’t use a mega-sound system to hold a political rally in front of a hospital in the middle of the night. You can’t pack a theater so full of people that no one can reach the fire exits without being trampled. In the physical world, these kinds of noise control and fire safety regulations uneventfully coexist with our First Amendment free speech and free assembly rights. They’re accepted as common-sense ways to keep us safe and preserve our sanity.

The same ideas can be applied to social media. By reverse engineering the noise and lack of crowd control that has overrun social media platforms, we can make the internet a more peaceful, reliable, less polarizing place.

And we can do it without the government policing speech. In fact, Congress does not have to do anything. It doesn’t even need to touch Section 230, the now infamous 1996 law that gives social media platforms immunity for the harmful content — from healthcare hoaxes to election misinformation to Russian and Chinese state-sponsored propaganda — that has created a world of chaos and division, where so many people don’t believe even the most basic truths. Instead, the Federal Trade Commission and other consumer protection regulators around the world could enforce the contracts the platforms already have with their users.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, already promises users that it will enforce “community standards” that prohibit, among other abuses: inciting violence, “inauthentic” behavior such as setting up fake accounts, promoting suicide, bullying, hate speech, graphic or sexually explicit content, human exploitation and misinformation “that will cause imminent physical harm, health-care misinformation and misinformation about elections and voting.”

Except, the FTC was created by an act of Congress and is funded by the federal government, hence, under the mandate of the 1st Amendment. It’s not up to them to determine what is considered Free Speech. If they tried, any on-line company can simply update their terms of service to avoid any FTC crackdown

The FTC’s website explains that “the Commission may use rulemaking to address unfair or deceptive practices or unfair methods of competition that occur commonly, in lieu of relying solely on actions against individual respondents.” Accordingly, the commission could enforce the content promises in these terms of service by promulgating a rule that any digital platform must prominently and clearly spell out in its terms of service what content it will allow and not allow — and then, as with their privacy assurances, make sure they keep those promises.

What Brill and the other lefties want is a return to censoring anyone who criticizes government and isn’t following exactly what Democrats want.

The FTC has the regulatory authority to proceed on its own without Congress to enforce the platforms’ own contractual promises. And you can encourage the commissioners to do just that. The FTC website invites consumers to report fraud. Although this is clearly meant for specific complaints about some online scam or unwelcome robo-call, if you think your social media company is not keeping its promises about preventing harmful content, you can report them.

Harmful in Liberal World means “information that upsets my world-views.” Information that is Wrongthink. Because there are easy answers: block the people you do not like. Stop using the service, which is usually free. Stop being so sensitive, you’re an adult. Democrats very much want to institute censorship wherever and whenever they can, because they do not want to have to compete on ideas.

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the “the number one challenge” in her fight against disinformation is “the First Amendment in the United States,” which makes it “a little bit tricky” to censor “bad information” and “the influence peddlers” who spread it.

NPR’s censor-in-chief. pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO

— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2024

Funny how the same people call Trump a Fascist while they look for ways to suppress Speech and other 1st Amendment provisions they do not like.

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