berg80
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- Oct 28, 2017
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Supreme Court allows White House to press social media companies to remove disinformation
The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the White House and federal agencies such as the FBI may continue to urge social media platforms to take down content the government views as misinformation, handing the Biden administration a technical if important election-year victory.
Of immediate significance, the decision means that the Department of Homeland Security may continue to flag posts to social media companies such as Facebook and X that it believes may be the work of foreign agents seeking to disrupt this yearâs presidential race.
Biden administration officials have for years tried to persuade social media platforms to take down posts featuring misinformation about vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, among other things. Many of those posts, the government has said, ran afoul of the platformsâ own stated policies.
Republican officials in two states â Missouri and Louisiana â and five social media users sued over that practice in 2022, arguing that the White House did far more than âpersuadeâ the tech giants to take down a few deceptive items. Instead, they said, the Biden administration engaged in an informal, backdoor campaign of coercion to silence voices it disagreed with â a practice known as âjawboning.â
They pointed to the decision by social media companies toâŻsuppress coverage of Hunter Bidenâs laptopâŻin late 2020 as evidence of unconstitutional government influence. But internal communications related to Twitterâs handling of the laptop story highlighted how high-level company officialsâŻwere dividedâŻon whether to suppress coverage of the story, contrary to suggestions by some critics that the platform demoted it because of government pressure.
It showed employees on Twitterâs legal, policy and communications teams debating â and at times disagreeing â over whether to restrict the article under the companyâs hacked materials policy, weeks before the 2020 election, where Joe Biden, Hunter Bidenâs father, ran against then-President Donald Trump.
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The matter pretty much blew up in House Repub's faces but of course that isn't how trump supporters appear to remember it. Since them Zuck has changed his tune on the issue. How else to get a front row seat at the inauguration (besides making a donation to it along with settling suit with Don to massage his scrotum).
It's a complex issue not given to simplistic talking points.
My students are undergraduates, some of whom will become journalists. Before they leave the confines of their small liberal-arts college, they will develop a more complicated view of politics and the media than the one they started with. The adult world they are entering, however, generally sticks to an elemental level of discourse. Last week, for example, the head of the countryâs largest media company, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, gave a nearly forty-minute lecture in which he reiterated that the right to free speech was invented so that it wouldnât be restricted. In Zuckerbergâs narrative, as my colleague Andrew Marantz has written, freedom of speech, guaranteed by technological progress, is the beginning and the end of the conversation; this narrative willfully leaves out the damage that technological progressâand unchallenged freedom of all speechâcan inflict. But the problem isnât just Zuckerberg; more precisely, Zuckerberg is symptomatic of our collective refusal to think about speech and the media in complicated ways.
âPeople having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world,â Zuckerberg said in his address. âItâs a fifth estate, alongside the other power structures in our society.â Zuckerberg was appropriating a countercultural term: beginning in the nineteen-sixties, âthe fifth estateâ referred to alternative media in the United States. Now the head of a new-media monopoly was using the term to differentiate Facebook from the news media, presumably to bolster his argument that Facebook should not be held to the same standards of civic responsibility to which we hold the fourth estate.
Mark Zuckerberg Doesnât Know What the First Amendment Is For
The Facebook C.E.O. is symptomatic of our collective refusal to think about speech and the media in complicated ways.
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