Posted on 08/27/2020 2:10:26 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
A set of voting rights groups and advocacy organizations is suing the Trump administration over the president’s executive order from May targeting the liability protections for social media platforms.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in California, the coalition claimed that President Trump’s order represented an unlawful retaliation for Twitter’s decision to fact-check his false tweets about mail-in voting. *They also say the order threatens their constitutional rights to receive curated information without government interference. *
The complaint asks the court to declare the order unconstitutional and to block administration officials from implementing or enforcing any part of it.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Protect Democracy Project and Cooley LLP filed the suit on behalf of the groups Common Cause, Free Press, Maplight, Rock the Vote and Vote Latino. It represents the second legal complaint challenging the president's order, which the administration said stemmed from "online censorship."
Section 230 has been regarded as the foundation of the modern internet; however, critics claim that it allows big platforms to avoid responsibility for content on its networks. Republicans also claim social media companies should not receive liability protections because they censor conservative speech, though little evidence has come out to support that position.
In their lawsuit, the advocacy groups argue that Trump’s order would undermine platforms' rights to moderate misinformation and lead to the greater proliferation of unsubstantiated posts about voting and elections. They claim this would force the groups to "divert scarce resources" away from their missions to combating misinformation.
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(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
What is 'curated information' and why is it a 'constitutional right'?
Since this lawsuit is being filed by all the usual suspects I suspect this has less to to with constitutional rights than it does with liberals controlling the narrative and flow of information.
Here are a couple articles I found about Content Curation:
The EFF is suing?
Let’s bankrupt them all, then.
“Republicans also claim social media companies should not receive liability protections because they censor conservative speech, though little evidence has come out to support that position.”
BECAUSE IT’S ALL BEEN DELETED, ALONG WITH THE POSTERS!
Idiots.
A set of voting rights groups and advocacy organizations”
I think we can just imagine who this bunch is.
Yah, but those angelic social media platforms are monopolies, son, and our job upon this earth is to insure that aristocracies and monopolies get special treatment from republicans.
They’re arguing that they have a constitutional right to have their information censored?
yup- in the past weeks I’ve had one of my FB accounts banned and a Twitter account suspended.
The FB account did nothing but report hate filled posts on the facebook page of GOP congresswoman Elise Stefanik- that’s all i did. I took screenshots of everything. They banned my account for no reason.
The twitter account was just suspended yesterday, with no reason. I appealed demanding to know why, other than silencing conservatives, the account was suspended. Have heard nothing back.
Social media sites use the term "curated content" to mean that the sites are merely hosting the content produced by users and are mediating it to prevent violations of their terms of service (no hate speech, etc.) and to prevent double posting of the same information (e.g. spam). For these reasons social media sites argue they are not violating anyone's 1st amendment rights nor are they engaging in overt censorship.
In short, it's just legal double-speak designed to mask social media's violation of 1st amendment rights by censoring content they don't agree with.
I’ve been in FB gulag more times than I can count!!!
1. "Curate", i.e. selectively publish information. In which case they are at least partially responsible for all content they publish and can be sued accordingly.
2. Publish all legal content that comes their way. In which case they are like the telephone company and only the content creator can be sued.
3. Continue along as they are currently doing which is curating information and avoiding law suits.
This third option is only open to them because when the internet was first getting going the government looked the other way regarding legal irregularities (e.g. Amazon not collecting sales tax, pornography access in every city regardless of local standards, etc.) because they didn't want to "kill the baby in its cradle".
The Big Tech companies have been living off this myth for decades now and their claim is that the only channels they are banning are ones that ought to be banned. However, channels like that created by Stefan Molyneux were killed, and he was just spouting off his rightwing anarcho-capitalist opinions. He always made it clear he never advocated violence. Yet Antifa channels remained up even those providing arguments in favor of violence like "Philosophy Tube" run by a neo-Marxist SJW philosopher.
They're clearly on the left end of the spectrum but not in an evil way. I used to talk to them in the 90'
I don't know the details of this lawsuit but these people are not bad people.
As long as they're the ones doing the censoring?
It sounds like they believe they have a 'constitutional right' to decide content.
Whatever they're doing they're doing it because it benefits them.
no- this wasn’t the gulag, i was banned and they won’t let me back.
Legal double-speak indeed.
Looks like EFF has lost their way.
Dang, I used to support the EFF. Man how far they have fallen...
Orwell is spinning in his grave.
"Conservatives claim that there is massive vote fraud in the big cities, though little evidence has come out to support that position.”
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