Free speech means a free internet — even if Democrats don't like it (Internet Bill of Rights)

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) recently held two days of hearings on proposed internet regulations. While the hysterical media has ginned up a new “red scare,” the FEC’s proposals will do nothing to stop bad actors, but will undermine our First Amendment rights to online political speech.

The FEC used the hearings, at which I testified, to consider different approaches — some more restrictive than others — to “improve” disclaimers for online political advertising. Yet FEC regulations already require political action committees (PACs) and other online spenders to use disclaimers where they can, or to click through to fully-disclaimed pages if they can’t. PACs are also required to disclose all of their expenditures monthly or quarterly, and file special reports whenever spending more than modestly to support or oppose candidates.

Existing regulations are clear and comprehensive. The law isn’t the so-called problem being addressed here, though; it’s all that persnickety speech outside the political establishment.

The FEC’s Democrats, most notably Vice Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, condemn advertising “paid for by Russia or other foreign countries,” urging Congress to “regulate political spending on the internet.” But that’s silly: The law already forbade those bad actors in the first place.

Bad actors won’t comply with the law — because they’re bad actors. For the political elites, who can afford to hire campaign finance lawyers and well-paid vendors, the FEC’s proposals will at most be a nuisance as they continue delivering their messages online.

With the censorship of conservatives on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and most social media platforms, there has been talk of an "Internet Bill of Rights".

We need to get ahead of this before the left co-opts the process.

What should be included in this Internet Bill of Rights (IBR)?

Google has been caught manipulating searches.

I'd like to see an independent review of algorithms used by social media platforms.

We need a "Right to Petition for Redress" AND the company must respond with specific reasons for censoring. No more vague excuses such as violating "community standards". These companies must tell the public what 'community standards' they are using and why. The company must give specific reasons including exactly what 'community standards' were violated.

We can't let the left define conservative speech as 'hate speech'.

What other rights do we need to keep the internet safe for free speech?

> What should be included in this Internet Bill of Rights (IBR)?

Site should not be able to remove themselves from internet archives (e.g. https://archive.org/web/). Especially news and fact check sites but I’d argue for any commercial, educational, or government site. History is recorded on the internet now they way it used to be in papers that could be bought and saved by an archive. We can’t let history be rewritten or let “fact checkers” keep us from seeing how their “checks” have worked out in the past.

One example:
In summer 2015 when Trump was a “human interest story” there were many articles written with links to news articles from the 1990s (and even 80s) about all kinds of good things he’d done like standing up to a racist city government and opening his properties to blacks and jews. I bookmarked the articles because most of my family & friends thought I was crazy supporting him and it helped to send links to real news sites about Trump’s past. As time went on and Trump was doing better, the links started disappearing. I could use google to find the articles reprinted somewhere else. Then those would disappear. The papers still had articles from the same days in their own archives, but the decade’s-old pro-Trump articles were gone. So it wasn’t that they lost their archives. Fine if they don’t want to keep an archive. Fine if they want to selectively scrub their archives for whatever reasons. But people need to be able to see what they published 2 or 3 decades ago whether they like it or not.

You are comparing apples to oranges...

There is the internet (ISP) COX/DirectTV/Dish/Earthlink end of it, and there is the social utility end of it (Google/Facebook/Twitter/Free republic... etc that uses the ISP as a content-delivery and exchange network.

This is not a free speech issue. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Disguise, Dummy Underground or any online news service provide/host privately administered content/social-messaging blogs and can sensor whomever they please. The same way Free Republic censors or blocks content or users at there personal discretion.

What you are wanting is for a private business... Facebook or Twitter and other PC/lefty social exchange networks, to be forced by regulation to behave like a public utility.

I disagree. You don’t like being censored or your comments filtered then start another Facebook for conservatives. Because you are not going to change Zuckerbergs fat head, his ego, his man-love for Obama or his ideological brainwashing.

> What you are wanting is for a private business... Facebook or Twitter and other PC/lefty social exchange networks, to be forced by regulation to behave like a public utility.

Not sure how you got that or if you were responding to a different post. I want an internet archive to be allowed to store anything that a private business puts on a public web page. There is a non-profit site that does that (archive.org)

Right now, there are sites which opt out of archiving. And they send lawyers after archive sites if the site wants to record their public web pages.

I don’t want any changes or regulations for private business other than not being able to opt out of archives. They are free to censor as much as they want before putting something on a public page. Once it’s public it should be archived (if an archive organization wants to save it) They can change or remove the public page/information as much as they want, but the original and all changes can be seen by everyone in the archive. I understand there are copyright issues and other possible abuses, but think there are solutions that allow a historical record of public information whether the publisher wants us to see their record or not.

Google doesn’t have to allow searches of the archive. FB and twitter can censor links to archive pages. Private businesses can still try to keep us from seeing things they don’t want us to see. But, if we know an article was published in the past we can go to the archive and find it. And historians will have the record decades from now.

My apologies if I skewed beyond your intended argument. I commented with a broader rationale.

Yes, in that regard I agree with your sediment. But you still have a problem with how to do what you invision without involing some kind of regulatory neutral oversight. And we all know how screwed up and convoluted that ends up.

Not needed. We’ve done fine without the gov up to now.

The FCC and its perennial “Fairness Doctrine” threat is a counterexample to your thesis.
In reality the FCC inherently is a violation of the First Amendment.
People are wanting to make Facebook and Twitter, and youTube, common carriers. I don’t see why that should be necessary, and it’s certain that it is a violation of the First Amendment.

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