The Gonzalez v. Google Case: Social Media As a Global Engine for Terrorism, Justice Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit

The best way to limit the power of any individual social media network is to make room for new networks and, perhaps even more important, for third-party sites that allow users to customize their online experience: combining content from multiple sites, controlling what kids can see and other features someone has imagined and needs a chance to make real.

Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected this argument due to Section 230. Yet the court was not enthusiastic in ruling against the Gonzalez family, with Judge Morgan Christen writing for the majority that despite its ruling, “we agree the Internet has grown into a sophisticated and powerful global engine the drafters of § 230 could not have foreseen.” And the court was not unanimous, with Judge Ronald Gould asserting that Section 230 does not immunize Google because its amplification of ISIS videos contributed to the group’s message (Section 230 does not apply if the platform even partly takes part in the development of content). “In short, I do not believe that Section 230 wholly immunizes a social media company’s role as a channel of communication for terrorists in their recruiting campaigns and as an intensifier of the violent and hatred-filled messages they convey,” Gould wrote. The Supreme Court agreed to look at the case after the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Gonzalez family.

Like many Section 230 cases, Gonzalez v. Google involves tragic circumstances. The plaintiffs are the family members and estate of Nohemi Gonzalez, a California State University student who, while studying abroad in Paris, was killed in the 2015 ISIS shootings along with 128 other people. The lawsuit accuses the subsidiary of allowing substantial assistance to terrorists. The center of this dispute is not simply that the videos were hosted by YouTube, but that they were the focus of their recommendations. The users who would be targeted by Google for the recommendation of videos from Isis were the users who showed the most interest in the terrorist group. In other words, YouTube allegedly showed ISIS videos to those more likely to be radicalized.

Section 230 was a little-noticed part of a major 1996 overhaul of US telecommunications laws. Section 230 was added to the telecommunications bill in response to two developments. The Senate enacted penalties for the transmission of indecent content. Section 230 was promoted as a compromise that would allow for more freedom of expression, and that is what it was, as part of a law signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The Supreme Court will rule the Senate’s portion unconstitutional in the next year.

First Amendment Free Speech Midterm Elections Courts Hyperocrisy: How Technology is Changing, and Why We Shouldn’t Act

If the legal system doesn’t work the First Amendment doesn’t work. Defending the exceptions to free speech doesn’t matter if people can’t be censured for serious violations or verdicts are used only for clout. And it’s especially useless if the courts themselves won’t take it seriously.

Legislators have used a cultural backlash against “Big Tech” as a pretext to engage in glib sound bites and political warfare, rather than addressing technology’s effects on democracy. Scratch the surface of supposedly “bipartisan” internet regulation, and you’ll find a mess of mutually exclusive demands fueled by reflexive outrage. Some of the people most vocally defending the First Amendment are the ones most open to dismantling it — without even admitting that they’re doing so.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

But making false claims about pandemic science isn’t necessarily illegal, so repealing Section 230 wouldn’t suddenly make companies remove misinformation. There’s a good reason why the First Amendment protects shaky scientific claims. Think of how constantly our early understanding of covid shifted — and now imagine researchers and news outlets getting sued for publishing good-faith assumptions that were later proven incorrect, like covid not being airborne.

The Attorney General of New York has called for changes to speech law that would ban distributing live videos filmed by mass shooters. Section 230’s protections for small sites that solicit non-consensual pornography and other illegal content has been proposed as a fix to the problems created by it. There is serious criticism of these approaches, but they are honest attempts to address legal tradeoffs.

The thing is, these complaints get a big thing right: in an era of unprecedented mass communication, it’s easier than ever to hurt people with illegal and legal speech. The legal system has become part of the problem, because it’s bigger and more complex than encouraging people to sue Facebook.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23435358/first-amendment-free-speech-midterm-elections-courts-hypocrisy

Should Social Media be a Media Utility? A Case Study of Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and Other Malicious Defamation Cases

It is not clear if it matters. Sandy Hook families were left without a way to pursue Jones’ money after he declared corporate bankruptcy during the procedure. He used the court proceedings to market his health supplements. The legal system has mostly failed to change his behavior, even though legal fees and damages have hurt his finances. If anything, it provided yet another platform for him to declare himself a martyr.

The big defamation case of the year was Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against amber Heard, who had identified publicly as a victim of abuse. Amber Heard’s case was less cut-and-dried than Jones’, but she lacked Jones’ shamelessness or social media acumen. The case turned into a mockery of Heard because courts failed to respond to the way in which social media contributed to the media circus. Defamation claims can meaningfully hurt people who have to maintain a reputation, while the worst offenders are already beyond shame.

I usually address Democratic and bipartisan reform proposals to Section 230 in order to have some kind of substance to them.

Republican-proposed speech reforms are bad. We learned how bad social media has become after Republican legislatures in Texas and Florida passed bills effectively banning social media moderation because they were being used to ban conservative politicians from posting on social media.

As it stands, the First Amendment should almost certainly render these bans unconstitutional. They’re government speech regulations. But while an appeals court blocked Florida’s law, Texas’ Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals threw a wrench in the works with a bizarre surprise decision to uphold its law without explaining its reasoning. Months later, that court actually published its opinion, which legal commentator Ken White called “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.”

The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Texas law, but its recent statements on speech have not been reassuring. The case will almost certainly be heard by a court that includes Clarence Thomas, who has argued that the government should be able to regulate social media like a public utility. Conservatives raged against the idea of treating internet service providers like public utilities in order to regulate them, which will make your brain hurt.

The law was put on hold by Thomas and two other justices. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan did as well and some think she did it to protest the ruling.

But only a useful idiot would support the laws in Texas and Florida on those grounds. The rules are rigged so that they punish political targets at the expense of consistency. They attack ” Big Tech” platforms because of their power, ignoring how close the internet service providers are to controlling access to those platforms. There is no saving a movement so intellectually bankrupt that it exempted media juggernaut Disney from speech laws because of its spending power in Florida, then subsequently proposed blowing up the entire copyright system to punish the company for stepping out of line.

And even as they rant about tech platform censorship, many of the same politicians are trying to effectively ban children from finding media that acknowledges the existence of trans, gay, or gender-nonconforming people. In addition to getting the books pulled from schools and libraries, the Republican state delegate in Virginia brought an obscenity law to prevent Barnes & Noble from selling the graphic memoir ‘Gender Queer’ and a young adult novel’A Court of Mist and Furry’. A panic over rooming affects all Americans. Even as Texas tries to stop violence on Facebook, it is still suing the company because of a constitutionally dubious law against erotica about children.

A real and meaningful tradeoff here: if you take the First Amendment at its broadest reading, virtually all software code is speech, leaving software-based services impossible to regulate. Airbnb and Amazon have both used Section 230 to defend against claims of providing faulty physical goods and services, an approach that hasn’t always worked but that remains open for companies whose core services have little to do with speech, just software.

Balk’s Law is obviously an oversimplification. Internet platforms change us, they incentivize specific types of posts, subjects, and linguistic quirks. But still, the internet is humanity at scale, crammed into spaces owned by a few powerful companies. And it turns out humanity at scale can be unbelievably ugly. Vicious abuse is possible from one person, or it may be spread out into a campaign of threats, lies, or terrorism involving thousands of people, but it isn’t likely to be a viable legal case.