By Tom Forrest
parler.com/user/GotoTom#/user/GotoTom
The 1st amendment rights of Google, Facebook, and Twitter must be terminated by new USA Federal laws.
USA Supreme Court Justice Thomas suggests regulating Big Tech platforms like utilities.
In the USA websites have the same 1st amendment constitutional rights as newspapers, to choose whether or not to carry, publish or withdraw the expression of others.
Congress enacted the Communications Decency Act (CDA) as Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in an attempt to prevent minors from gaining access to sexually explicit materials on the Internet.
Section 230 of the CDA did not create or modify Big Tech's 1st amendment rights. The law merely ensures that courts will quickly dismiss lawsuits that would have been dismissed anyway on First Amendment grounds, with far less hassle, stress and expense.
At the scale of the billions of pieces of content posted by users every day, that liability shield is essential to ensure that website owners are not forced to abandon their right to moderate content by a tsunami of meritless but costly litigation.
I have become very unhappy with all these socialist-Marxist Democrats that write about why evil Facebook, Twitter, and Google should not be regulated. We need new laws to protect online freedom of speech. However some socialist Democrats like Bernie Sanders and others do want to have government regulations and controls on Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
The socialist-Marxist Democrats like to mix in facts with their Leftard bullshit.
They think it gives them some credibility to use the facts, then sprinkle their socialist lies on top of the facts.
Vox.com, BusinessInsider.com, TechDirt.com are some of the worst offenders of truth seekers like me. TechDirt just makes up blatant lies.
YouTube/Google is hiding this video, and they lie about the number of views and delete the comments.
The specter of monopoly
To USA Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, the current government regulations and laws may be fine for small retail stores.
However Facebook, as he tweeted on October 15, “is a lot like a supermarket ... except there’s only ONE supermarket in town, and they decide who can and can’t shop.
That’s what we call a monopoly.”
In 2017 and 2018, for example, it tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to reduce the quantity and prominence of political news. As Will Oremus reported, this had a huge impact on the media business: “Traffic from Facebook plummeted a staggering 87 percent, from a January 2017 peak of 28 million to less than 4 million in May 2018. It’s down more than 55 percent in 2018 alone.”
The United States has traditionally subjected communications technology to regulatory standards that go beyond market efficiency because they are seen as having particular social importance.
But the question for those who’d regulate social media is: What are they trying to achieve?
