Judge Terry Doughty's judicial handiwork is having an immediate impact. He must be feeling so proud:
One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration's communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats.
....The canceled meetings show that the injunction is affecting government efforts to protect elections....“There is so much wrong with this decision — not least of all that it will make us less secure going into the 2024 elections,” wrote Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, in a social media post. Roth said the most glaring problem with the decision is that it asserts the companies were “coerced” to remove posts simply because they met with government officials. “That’s just … not how any of this works,” he wrote.
So no more meetings with Facebook and no more warnings of foreign election interference. We are shooting ourselves in our collective butts if we keep this up.
Is it a win for the political right, though? As they slowly broach the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the political right -- which heavily relies on lies constructed within their alternate reality -- will end up political losers. Social media will self-censor sooner and greater, without any perceived coercion from the government, and when they fail, they will get sued and far-right accounts will be shut down.
from your finger tips to God's browser...
“So no more meetings with Facebook and no more warnings of foreign election interference.”
Feature not a bug.
Vladimir Putin still has significant and well established power in America. And will for a long time now.
Republicans break things, the complain that things are broken and "only they can fix it".
One interesting reaction I've seen from strong progressives, which frankly bewilders me, is essentially "this decision is good because any contact from the government other than by public notice carries the implicit threat of secret coercion." It's pretty much the same message as Reagan's anti-government "we're from the government and we're here to help you" snark.
I can't figure out whether it's some sort of knee-jerk libertarian-ish reflex, or a kind of reductio ad absurdum under which such contact is bad because it means a future right-wing administration inevitably will use it to impose severe censorship (as though they'd need any prompting or justification to do that if they wanted to), or whether it's just addle-headed paranoia. But sure enough, there's a "horseshoe" phenomenon here.
It's not a horseshoe, it's a full circle, those are leftist social conservatives.
I'm a leftie, and I'm pretty sure if the government really wants to coerce me to do or not do something, they will do so under threat of arrest and/or physical force. You know, like red states do all the time now to minorities of all kinds and people with a uterus.
The idea that a blue state or government is going to rely on just social media to coerce me or anybody else into doing something is so hilarious.
I don't think it is any more complicated then what you put in quotes. Any contact is government coercion even if it is defending against dangerous misinformation that effects people's health and our democracy.
You guys need to look outside your bubble. COVID opened my eyes up The government censorship of anyone who disagreed with Fauci, no matter how respected they were in their fields, is why I care very much about this issue. I really wanted to understand risks and benefits, but the information was sparse because of the censorship. And so many of the banned experts turned out to be correct.
I do not understand why it is OK for the Boston Globe to write an entire article about how nuts RFK Jr is without giving one explicit reason, and then have YouTube et al ban him from their airwaves. This is purely political expediency. It's not protecting anyone to ban people from expressing opinions.
?!??!? "The censorship of anyone who disagreed with Fauci"? So all that incessant multi-year caterwauling by Republican politicians, right-wing media, and any anti-vax lunatic who could get in front of a camera was ... something I imagined?
This is a joke, right? Gotta be.
RFK Jr. said Hiv does not cause AIDS - is that demented enough? On the Covid shot I think there was enough information out there weighing the pluses and the cons. Fauci did drop the ball on the mask situation early on, so he is not perfect. But do I have a problem with the media not publishing disinformation like vaccines cause autism? No.
It is pretty clear that vaccines do not cause autism but dues that mean the government should be urging social media companies to censor such information?
It is also pretty clear that communism is a failed economic model and that communist regimes have a long and almost ubiquitous history of mad murdering their citizens. Should the government be allowed to push social media companies to censor support for communism and to threaten regulatory changes that will hurt these companies if they do not comply?
I see no issue with anybody, including government officials, bringing up the horse manure that can have Ill consequences that occurs in social media sites, what the social media sites do with that information is up to them. If you want to read how (cough, cough) how childhood vaccinations cause autism, it is very easy to find, I certainly would no call it censorship. You see, a government of the people owes something to the people, abdicating this responsibility is tantamount or has the same effect as endorsing it. The government, at a minimum, should warn all of us about recognized health hazards, I expect no less.
If your "research" depended on material posted on social media, it was worthless.
Conservatism is about conserving Nazis and vindictive 14-year olds.
Trump tried to dox President Obama. Armed man in a van, who'd made threats against Obama, was caught in Obama's neighborhood, armed and with hundreds of ammo -- source
Maybe it's time to pull back the blanket protections of Section 230.
OT.
You want to tackle this topic again?
A common belief is that drug use is how many people became houseless. The paradigm is generally reverse -- being houseless causes major depression, so to escape, many resort to drug use.
The first policy recommendation to stopping houselessness in the first place, is to increase access to affordable housing, which in turn means building way more affordable housing than what is currently available.
True but doesn't matter. Homeless people are icky, and so a good 70-85% of Americans would like to just eradicate them from public view. The only thing those Americans disagree about is whether the homeless should be herded to designated places that Nobody Who Matters will ever see them, or if the homeless should be stuffed into prisons or gas chambers. And I suspect the solution that ultimately wins out among these morally-deficient Americans will be the one that costs the least amount of public funds to implement.
It requires no government funding at all just to eliminate many of the regulations that prevent new housing.
San Francisco had a horrible homelessness problem. Try buying a lot in San Francisco and putting up a thirty story apartment building and see how fast the government shuts down your project.
If there are more households than houses you must have homelessness.
The Biden administration should just continue these meetings and tell this idiot judge to bugger off. Just make some sort of argument that what the meetings are about aren't disallowed by the ruling. Doesn't have to make sense but keep having the meetings.
I know Biden really wants everything to get back to "normal" (whatever that means at this point) and lead by example, yada, yada, but if Trump wins in 2024 how much will he break things again. So, between now and the next election the Biden administration should worry less about norms comity and all of that BS and more about saving democracy.
We?
"We" indeed.
For some reason the Lone Ranger/Tonto joke is always in my top 5, and has been since I heard it decades ago. 🙂
Really, I'm nor part of that "we".
Well, the Biden administration shouldn't have overstepped. If it was only foreign bots they could have gotten away with it. But they used it to stop anyone who disagreed with Saint Fauci. This is not a power that should be taken lightly - I can't believe that progressives/liberals want government censorship. This is not the party/philosophy that I signed up for.
OMG folks, he may actually be serious about this ...
Or wait, no no, a bot, or some Republican-aligned Russian troll. That makes a lot more sense.
BINGO
I think you want the 'New York Post' - take the elevator to the basement and turn hard right.
Wiki
In 2021, Doughty issued a nationwide injunction against a federal mandate that health care workers be vaccinated against COVID-19. His opinion repeated claims of Dr. Peter McCollough ...
McCullough [was] called by committee chair Senator Ron Johnson to testify before a United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on COVID-19 treatments held in November 2020. McCullough testified in support of social distancing, vaccination, and controversial treatments, including hydroxychloroquine.
We are shooting ourselves in our collective butts if we keep this up.
Who are "we", and what are we supposed to be "keeping up"? It's not apparent how liberals could stop Trump Republican judges issuing partisan political decisions. Republicans don't want any restrictions on social media content because they want to be free to flood the zone with shit, to use Bannon's elegant expression. Decisions like Doughty's serve their purposes admirably.
"we": what "we" white man?
For Doughty's people, destroying democracy is a feature, not a bug.