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Florida to ban "deplatforming" of candidates - there's a flaw in this law a mile wide

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  • seanD
    replied
    Originally posted by KingsGambit View Post
    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...orming-rcna784

    Florida has passed a law stating that media platforms cannot ban political candidates from their platform.

    To explain why this is a bad idea, let's back up to 2010. A career Neo Nazi named Frazier Glenn Miller (same guy who is now on death row for opening fire at a Jewish community building several years after this incident) moved to Missouri and filed as a third party candidate in a local election. He had no chance of winning, but he was aware that the FCC has a rule that political candidates have to be allowed to run ads without censorship. He put together a series of radio ads ranting against Jews and African-Americans, though he actually used racial slurs to refer to them, and the FCC ruled that radio stations couldn't refuse to run them. The only reason he was running was to get those ads on the air. He of course lost and only got a few votes.

    Now, anybody who wants to go and post racial rants online can just register as a candidate, and they are in effect unbannable. Social media companies' hands are tied.

    I am requesting that discussion of Trump be kept to an absolute minimum in this thread. We all know he inspired the law, but we have hundreds of other threads in this section to talk about him.
    Since we know for a fact federal government is influencing social media platforms to ban what they don't like, this is a justifiable action by a state to take. To worry about a rare occasion some nazi uses a "loophole" to spew out naughty racist words seems to so minuscule to the bigger issue.

    Leave a comment:


  • Mountain Man
    replied
    I'm trying to think of how a law could be constructed that would prevent media platforms from abusing their monopoly on the internet to censor ideas but would also prevent people from using the law as a loophole to post deliberately offensive content that can not be censored. Case in point, how do you even sensibly define what constitutes "deliberately offensive content"?

    Better question: is this something the government should even be getting involved in? I think Mike "My Pillow" Lindell has the right idea: start his own platform (even though the rollout has been somewhat troubled).
    Last edited by Mountain Man; 04-30-2021, 12:45 PM.

    Leave a comment:


  • CivilDiscourse
    replied
    Originally posted by KingsGambit View Post

    This is fair, and certainly these considerations have been handled in a clumsy way. It seems like most of the major platforms have moved in the direction you've suggested with Covid in that they are not pretending to be neutral on the issue. There have been some hiccups; I know a guy who has a podcast with the word "Bible" in it. He had an episode on Covid vaccines. He ultimately concluded that it was fine for Christians to take it and that the Bible does not even talk about vaccinations, but Youtube took it down as promoting false information. They probably saw the words "Bible", "Covid", and assumed it was crazytown. He appealed as there was nothing in his video that violated any rules, but the appeal was denied within five minutes, clearly not enough time for anybody to watch his 45 minute video.
    What I think is more dangerous is more the stealth approach. Facebook, twitter, google, etc. all have black-box algorithms that manipulate what you see. The fact that they can adjust them to put their fingers on the scale without anyone definitively noticing is the scarier part.

    Leave a comment:


  • KingsGambit
    replied
    Originally posted by CivilDiscourse View Post

    Overall, this is a thorny subject. There is alot of conflicting interest and free speech issues that also tie into the outsized influence the major social media platforms have.

    I would say what needs to be done is for platforms to be required to be open about bias instead of falsely advertising neutrality. It's one thing to be biased against a certain political viewpoint, it's an entire other one to do so, while claiming you are politically neutral.

    More importantly, as a society, we need to move away from calling for people's heads when they voice opinions we don't like. If we stopped doing that, then the social media companies would likely not end up having as much censorship as they do.
    This is fair, and certainly these considerations have been handled in a clumsy way. It seems like most of the major platforms have moved in the direction you've suggested with Covid in that they are not pretending to be neutral on the issue. There have been some hiccups; I know a guy who has a podcast with the word "Bible" in it. He had an episode on Covid vaccines. He ultimately concluded that it was fine for Christians to take it and that the Bible does not even talk about vaccinations, but Youtube took it down as promoting false information. They probably saw the words "Bible", "Covid", and assumed it was crazytown. He appealed as there was nothing in his video that violated any rules, but the appeal was denied within five minutes, clearly not enough time for anybody to watch his 45 minute video.

    Leave a comment:


  • CivilDiscourse
    replied
    Originally posted by KingsGambit View Post
    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...orming-rcna784

    Florida has passed a law stating that media platforms cannot ban political candidates from their platform.

    To explain why this is a bad idea, let's back up to 2010. A career Neo Nazi named Frazier Glenn Miller (same guy who is now on death row for opening fire at a Jewish community building several years after this incident) moved to Missouri and filed as a third party candidate in a local election. He had no chance of winning, but he was aware that the FCC has a rule that political candidates have to be allowed to run ads without censorship. He put together a series of radio ads ranting against Jews and African-Americans, though he actually used racial slurs to refer to them, and the FCC ruled that radio stations couldn't refuse to run them. The only reason he was running was to get those ads on the air. He of course lost and only got a few votes.

    Now, anybody who wants to go and post racial rants online can just register as a candidate, and they are in effect unbannable. Social media companies' hands are tied.

    I am requesting that discussion of Trump be kept to an absolute minimum in this thread. We all know he inspired the law, but we have hundreds of other threads in this section to talk about him.
    Overall, this is a thorny subject. There is alot of conflicting interest and free speech issues that also tie into the outsized influence the major social media platforms have.

    I would say what needs to be done is for platforms to be required to be open about bias instead of falsely advertising neutrality. It's one thing to be biased against a certain political viewpoint, it's an entire other one to do so, while claiming you are politically neutral.

    More importantly, as a society, we need to move away from calling for people's heads when they voice opinions we don't like. If we stopped doing that, then the social media companies would likely not end up having as much censorship as they do.

    Leave a comment:


  • Florida to ban "deplatforming" of candidates - there's a flaw in this law a mile wide

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...orming-rcna784

    Florida has passed a law stating that media platforms cannot ban political candidates from their platform.

    To explain why this is a bad idea, let's back up to 2010. A career Neo Nazi named Frazier Glenn Miller (same guy who is now on death row for opening fire at a Jewish community building several years after this incident) moved to Missouri and filed as a third party candidate in a local election. He had no chance of winning, but he was aware that the FCC has a rule that political candidates have to be allowed to run ads without censorship. He put together a series of radio ads ranting against Jews and African-Americans, though he actually used racial slurs to refer to them, and the FCC ruled that radio stations couldn't refuse to run them. The only reason he was running was to get those ads on the air. He of course lost and only got a few votes.

    Now, anybody who wants to go and post racial rants online can just register as a candidate, and they are in effect unbannable. Social media companies' hands are tied.

    I am requesting that discussion of Trump be kept to an absolute minimum in this thread. We all know he inspired the law, but we have hundreds of other threads in this section to talk about him.

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