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NYT Makes Stealth Edits to Elon Musk Piece Tainting Him with Apartheid Smears; Writer Lashes Out at Critics
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Texas has declared open season on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with censorship law
Texas residents can now sue Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for allegedly censoring their content after a federal appeals court sided Wednesday with the state’s law restricting how social media sites can moderate their platforms.
The 15-word ruling allowing the law, which had been blocked last year, to take effect has significant potential consequences. Most immediately, it creates new legal risks for the tech giants, and opens them up to a possible wave of litigation that legal experts say would be costly and difficult to defend.
Texas’s law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
The law creates enormous uncertainty about how social media will actually function in Texas, according to legal experts, and raises questions about what users’ online spaces may look like and what content they may find there, if the companies are even able to run their services at all.
The ruling also sets the stage for what could be a Supreme Court showdown over First Amendment rights and, possibly, a dramatic reinterpretation of those rights that affects not just the tech industry but all Americans — and decades of established precedent.
In short, the decision has allowed Texas to declare open season on tech platforms, with huge ramifications for everyone in the country. It could reshape the rights and obligations of all websites; our relationship to technology and the internet; and even our basic, fundamental understanding of the First Amendment.
A controversial law takes effect
The origins of Texas’s law, HB 20, lie in the longstanding Republican criticism that tech platforms discriminate politically against conservative users, a charge the companies have denied and which platform moderation researchers say there is little systemic evidence to support.
The law, which seeks to address the perceived imbalance, was blocked in December by a district court judge who ruled it was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. That decision came months after a similar law, in Florida, was also blocked for the same reason.
But that all changed this week, when in oral arguments at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel confused social media platforms with internet service providers; disputed that Facebook and Twitter are websites; and expressed surprise that a service such as Twitter could “just decide” what content appears on its platform as a matter of course.
The result was Wednesday’s decision overturning the lower-court injunction that had kept Texas’s law from going into effect. The ruling promptly led Texas’s attorney general Ken Paxton — who is also empowered to sue tech companies under HB 20 — to declare victory.
“My office just secured another BIG WIN against BIG TECH,” Paxton’s office tweeted.
The appeals court has not provided a written opinion explaining the decision, and it did not offer the tech advocacy groups who challenged the law time to seek an appeal.
“Apparently, they do not think this is disruptive or something,” said Harold Feld, a senior vice president and communications lawyer at the consumer group Public Knowledge.
Whatever happens next, legal experts appear convinced that the outcome will be chaos.
Uncharted waters
We are now in uncharted waters. For as long as the major US social networks have existed, they have been able to lean on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a liability shield for how platforms handle user-generated content. Section 230 has bailed tech platforms out of many a lawsuit over the years. But the Texas law is poised to change everything. The tech industry’s opponents have never had something like HB 20 on their side.
The scope of the law is truly vast, according to legal scholars. It is broad both in terms of its text — explicitly naming at least nine types of prohibited content moderation — as well as its subtext. What does it really mean to “de-boost” or “deny equal visibility”? The ambiguity of those terms provides carte blanche to creative plaintiffs willing to stretch the definitions of the English language, according to Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the US Naval Academy.
“Just think of all the actions that could be seen as ‘denying equal visibility’ to user content,” Kosseff tweeted.
The state law also forces tech companies to fight the same battles over and over again, prohibiting them from citing a successful defense in one court as a way of nipping similar cases in the bud in other courts.
“Those are all things you’d do if you wanted to make litigation as attractive, expensive, and difficult to defend as possible,” said Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer better known as @Popehat on Twitter.
In theory, Section 230 may still preempt the state law and allow tech platforms to continue to escape liability. But the Fifth Circuit ruling throws much of that in doubt.
How social media platforms might respond
Supposing the law is not hit with another injunction, social media platforms must now try to figure out how to comply with it, with the knowledge that the litigation is ongoing and things could still change — again.
What does social media look like in a post-HB 20 world? It isn’t obvious. (Facebook and Twitter declined to comment for this story; YouTube didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
One option for tech platforms is to halt all algorithmic content filtering or ranking entirely. While it’s tempting to imagine all social media looking like the clean, reverse-chronological feed you can actually find on Twitter today (if you know where to look), that is merely the best-case scenario and not the likeliest one, according to Daphne Keller, a platform liability expert at Stanford University.
This is a pipe dream, so youtube is supposed to create a special algorithm for users in Texas. That would mean a viewer in England would get significantly different search results for certain subjects than someone in TexasOriginally Posted by SalesServiceGuy
When you think you have made a procedure idiot proof your company employs a better idiot.
I think your interpretation of this new law is correct. Texas almost certainly will end up in the US Supreme Court over this one and hopefully looses.
I think the average Texan will be very disappointed with this State gov't overreach. Texas has very repressive abortion laws and there are many protest videos from well known YouTube channels like Vice News.
Unfortunately, there is lots of "dark money" in the USA that would be eager to frivolously sue YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for alleged damages.
In the above story, the key player Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on state securities fraud charges relating to activities prior to taking office. He has pleaded not guilty. In October 2020, several high-level assistants in Paxton's office accused him of "bribery, abuse of office and other crimes".
After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Donald Trump refused to concede while making false claims of election fraud, Paxton aided Trump in his efforts to overturn the result, from filing the unsuccessful Texas v. Pennsylvania case in the Supreme Court to speaking at the rally Trump held on January 6, 2021, that immediately preceded the 2021 United States Capitol attack.
Paxton has been involved in gerrymandering voter districts, threatened lawsuits against Federal gov't COVID regulations, wasted tax paper money on frivolous immigration and human trafficking convictions, opposed LGBTQ rights, frivolously threatened voters rights in Texas where no voter fraud was found, opposed absentee voting, accumulated 22,000 wasted taxpayer hours in trying to find non existent voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election and has been accused many times of state ethics violations.
... this stinky new Texas law enabling anyone to sue media companies for censorship issues was written by this very twisted Attorney General, appointed the questionable Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Laws like this prove just how frightened Republicans really are
Well I am glad we agree on something, but the article goes on to say that if a citizen of Texas can prove there is censorship on a platform they can take action, but since when has an individual succeeded against a tech giant ?
This should have been posted 1st April
When you think you have made a procedure idiot proof your company employs a better idiot.
... a citizen front man with a ton of Dark Money pushing the strings.
Like Soros?
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so expressions like Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is warranted, neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust, and encouraging children to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior like eating disorders.
When “a private entity provides a forum for speech,” it may “exercise editorial discretion over the speech and speakers in the forum.” Manhattan Cmty. Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S. Ct. 1921, 1930 (2019).
Supreme Court Asked For An Emergency Review Of Texas’ Dangerous Social Media Law | Techdirt
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