I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
Given Facebook’s massive deplatforming of at least
seven “conservatives” Thursday in its Purge 4.0, some, such as Will
Chamberlain, are arguing now that platform access should be viewed as a civil
right, link.
He argues that this could be enforced now through the
courts with “private action”.I’m not
sure I concur yet.
He wants the courts to enforce the right to private
action for all lawful speech on platforms that would be protected under the
First Amendment, even though they are hosted by private companies.
Section 230, while it enables the companies to offer
the users opportunities to generate content with moderation, still does not
prevent platforms from enforcing their own political judgments in monitoring content.
One obvious problem is that Facebook is an international company and operates globally in countries where free speech is less absolute than in the U.S., and where tribal (and often religious or sometimes racial) ideologies have much more sway on less individualistic persons than they do in the U.S., just as these ideologies (often related to populism) matter a lot more generally among people who feel left behind economically. It has to be concerned that posts even originating from Americans under American ideas of individualized free speech may in some cases trigger incidents in other parts of the world, even unintentionally. Somewhat as a counterweight to that idea, it is true that in most of the world, private weapons ownership is indeed less common than in the U.S.; First and Second Amendment ideas work together. Around the world, many countries or observers want to treat social media companies as "publishers" rather than utilities, which by definition means they choose the content providers which reinforce their brands; the only public remedy then is to have enough competition among the big platforms. As I noted Thursday, companies do have a right to
protect their brands according to the political biases of their clients (advertisers),
but they don’t have a right to collude or form monopolies.
I’ve talked about “conflict of interest” in the
workplace where a manager’s public speech could cause tensions with
subordinates or consumers.It would be a
good question, for example, to look at the “speech rights” of someone who acts
as an insurance agent and who makes a living on commissions but whose activity
could affect company reputation. Is a “commission” for a salesman comparable to
advertising income for a content creator?Not exactly, because a sales person or financial planner, for example,
represents his company’s values, not his own (“we give you the words”).But that should not be true when a content creator
speaks on a social media platform.
Yet Facebook seems to be interpreting harmful speech
very broadly in terms of groups of people and minorities as such rather than as
an individual rights issue. Milo’s speech is silly, perhaps, but only harmful
to minorities if you assume they need to become combative as groups to protect themselves.
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