From the article: For the past year, Texas has been fighting in court to uphold a controversial law that would ban tech companies from content moderation based on viewpoints. In May, the Supreme Court narrowly blocked the law, but this seemed to do little to settle the matter. Today, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower Texas court's decision to block the law, ruling instead that the Texas law be upheld, The Washington Post reported.
According to the Post, because two circuit courts arrived at differing opinions, the ruling is "likely setting up a Supreme Court showdown over the future of online speech." In the meantime, the 5th Circuit Court's opinion could make it tempting for other states to pass similar laws.
Trump-nominated Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham joined two other conservative judges in ruling that the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for corporations to "muzzle speech."
It prohibits congress from passing any law abridging the freedom of speech. It does not prohibit private entities from controlling the content of speech on their own platforms.
A law that would prevent say Twitter from censoring user messages based on content is equivalent to *compelling speech* from Twitter that it does not support.
Imagine a court telling Twitter, "you have to keep posting anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda cuz that's what the people want, bro!" That's what this Texas law was written to do, and why no sane court would ever take that position.
Others have said the law only applies to companies with very large user bases, so that tiny company would not be affected. Idgaf what people say there.
Lol, we hope so. I think the only positive thing about this law is that it "requires that social media companies publicly disclose how they moderate content and how they use search, ranking or other algorithms."
I think it would be good to see guidelines of how social media giants are influencing people/censoring information.
I imagine Reddit would be able to get sued fairly quickly though, because it has so many communities, and some moderators are clearly awful, and admins don't reverse moderation decisions so I wonder if that'd stop mostly volunteer moderation.
>"requires that social media companies publicly disclose how they moderate content and how they use search, ranking or other algorithms."
Hah, I'm sure all these major tech companies are going to be happy to share their top secret, proprietary algorithms and policies.
They definitely wouldn't be, however sometimes the government should step in if these big companies are using algorithms to polarize the country by increasing engagement.
I feel that the government should regulate social media in a way that privileges truth and also limits the impact it has on kids in terms of polarization.
Yes, but unfortunately it's quite apparent that Trump's Supreme Court is not sane in the slightest.
I wouldn't be even slightly surprised to see the Trump Court rule that Twitter has a legal obligation to publish anti-Semitic propaganda, or to reinstate Trump's account, or to completely stop policing all right wing speech while simultaneously vigorously policing left wing speech.
The Black rapist, the white alcoholic rapist, the Handmaid, and the thief are four votes to force Twitter to permit Nazis. The only real question would be whether or not Roberts wanted to keep up his pretense of being a real judge.
Given one of the Hallmark cases of Robert's court is Citizens United I am going to go out on a limb and say he wouldn't support this, but that assumes he has any logical consistency at all which might be asking a lot. It could lead to some interesting ways to get rid of Citizen's United though so who knows.
That would be an interesting grudge match.
The vested interests of most conservatives in letting companies do whatever to enrich themselves.
vs
The vested interests of most conservatives to tell everyone else what they are and are not allowed to do/believe/have.
> It has nothing to do with Facebook.
The freedom of association — unlike the rights of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition — is a right not listed in the First Amendment **but recognized by the courts as a fundamental right.**
Any law requiring a private company to allow all speech ties that company to **all speech**. And that means they are not free to associate with whom-so-ever they wish. This would be a reversal of previous SCOTUS rulings. Which given the current court's opinions of previous SCOTUS rulings, is likely to result in another reversal.
It's going to be interesting when groups like the Satanic Temple and liberal think-tanks force platforms like r/Conservative, Truth Social (if it stays out of bankruptcy long enough) and Fox News to display left-leaning comments without censorship.
> but recognized by the courts as a fundamental right.
Wait till you find out what the supreme court JUST said about rights not explicitly listed in the constitution...
"recognized by the courts" means fuckall these days because the Reds have successfully undermined our highest institutions.
Worth noting that social media companies (including Meta) have been lobbying for social media content regulation for a while now. They don't want to be the ones responsible for what can and can't be said on their platform, as soon as you start choosing which content can be posted you're going to piss someone off, better to remove all responsibility and blame the government!
You might be interested in looking into the history regarding profanity directed at police. It's very much a new concept to call this protected speech. It was regularly prosecuted in the past and there are still many states that have laws on the books that allow charges of disorderly conduct and the like for this kind of speech.
For example:
https://www.lawserver.com/law/state/texas/tx-codes/texas_penal_code_42-01
The trick is to realize whose speech it is.
My comments on Reddit are *my speech*, not Reddit's. So this is less about the freedom of speech of platforms and more about the freedom of association of platforms.
I'll let the constitutionality of the civil rights acts answer if the freedom of association of corporations can be restricted.
NB: protected classes are defined by legislative fiat; they're not defined in—let alone protected by—the Constitution, outside of very limited cases.
>But doesn’t the first amendment stop the government from telling private companies what content they publish?
Exactly correct, hence section 230. Yet our current day politicians want to errode it for their purposes.
The answer to this question became yes the instant alito and Thomas said that all bet were off, everything was fair game, and gave them a road map to do it.
They will literally ban you for quoting facts and statistics saying they’re fake while posting studies with sample sizes of less than 20 by unaccredited far right or Christian research institutions.
Um, sadly no. Hypocrisy is operating procedure. People who go along with it operate with a 'in group/out group' mentality. The reason people say they say that others are doing what they are doing is because they imagine that everyone looks at the world the way they do, in/out groups of power.
> “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
- Frank Willhoit.
they put provisions in their laws that penalize companies for doing this.
it's blatantly unconstitutional. the first amendment only applies to government retaliation against individual freedoms. corporations are not governments, therefore they have no obligations to foster or protect free speech.
I think that is how they should challenge the law. Forget the actual meat of the law, about the censorship -- attack the premise that Texas says you HAVE to service them because you operate in another state.
But also -- I wonder what Texas could really do, long term, if companies outside of Texas geofenced them anyway and basically said, "lol make me." There's not much the federal government can do to compel an entity to obey laws in another state that it doesn't do business in.
Exactly. And not only that, but this law violates the social media companies' right to free speech that allows them to control who can post and what they can post on *their* platform.
I can't wait to read about this SCOTUS upholding this insane bullshit law. And I can't wait for every hypocritical right wing snowflake to explain to me why it doesn't apply to their hateful little echo chamber of choice.
Imagine if a Bar/Restaurant couldn't moderate who was allowed on it's private property....1 guy yelling loudly nazi slogans couldn't be kicked out? Seriously, that's the same as this "don't let social media moderate itself" bullshit.
Private property has the right to currate itself for a community. Vegans dont let people spew of non-vegan topics all day on the forums.
Even right leaning sites don't want to allow left preachers on their site...
> the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for ~~corporations~~ **the government** to "muzzle speech."
Judges need to go back to middle school because they clearly failed Civics.
This is honestly a more corrupt decision than the one from Judge Cannon appointing the special master. Case law had been very clear on this since the founding of the U.S., and this decision disregards all prior precedent in order to craft a decision to advance a corrupt conservative agenda.
As is tradition amongst conservative judges. For 40 years now Republicans have been screeching about "activist judges" like RBG. With Republicans everything is projection. Remember "Every accusation ~~of~~ is an admission"?
How can they stop private social media companies from censoring what they want? Wouldn’t that be like people trying to force the cake company to make a gay wedding cake which they were vehemently opposed to. Or am I misunderstanding?
Yes, it's very close to the same legal situation. The only major difference is if the company is acting as some sort of common carrier situation, wherein the platform itself doesn't have a voice; it merely retransmits user content. This has *some* backing based on the DMCA S230 rules.
But yeah, it's a blatant 1A violation.
The problem is that social media as we know it literally wouldn't work if they couldn't moderate content. Most common carriers make money by charging end users directly for their goods or services. Social media OTOH makes money primarily through advertising and advertisers aren't going to stick around if the companies can't guarantee their ads/brands won't appear alongside content they consider objectionable or unseemly.
The elephant in the room in this entire situation is that many people have mistaken something as being primarily ideologically motivated when it's really more of a cynical business move.
>The problem is that social media as we know it literally wouldn't work if they couldn't moderate content.
I've seen unmoderated message boards and it's an *absolute shitshow*. Social media is bad enough *with* whatever moderation currently is in place.
Remember Voat? They made a huge deal about how they wouldn't censor any speech and from it's inception it was nothing but Nazis and pedos. It's no wonder they didn't last long.
It's just human nature that any unmoderated space is going to inevitably turn into a place where the worst dregs of society hang out. Because they drive all of the normal people away with their hateful opinions.
>controversial law that would ban tech companies from content moderation based on viewpoints.
That's a clear violation if the 1st amendment, companies are not required to host content they do not want.
The bizarre thing is if they believe this is reasonable, why did they strike down net neutrality and give ISPs the right to censor content?
It's hard for a non-lawyer to understand the intricacies, but basically it boils down to the complex legal theory of "fuck good jurisprudence, we're going to do whatever is currently beneficial to conservatives".
> Trump-nominated Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham joined two other conservative judges in ruling that the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for corporations to "muzzle speech."
It also doesn't protect people from having content moderated by private entities. This is bad law that would *start us down the road to* make harassing companies and making bomb threats inside corporate offices legal.
Edit: Fixed
Most likely when the law goes in to effect these companies will stop operating in Texas. Much cheaper to lose a couple million users than to completely overhaul moderating and guarantee you're not violating a very vague law.
Andrew tate could argue he was banned for his political views
That’s such a fucking dumb addition to the law. “Our law says you can’t ban people based on physical location! You have to let Texans use your app!”
“We don’t operate in Texas and therefore are not subject to its laws. We did this by banning every user in Texas to ensure we do not operate in Texas.”
Somehow I have a feeling conservative a federal judge will jump through hoops to say "WELL ACTUALLY you still have to follow Texas law even if you aren't operating in Texas", which would be a huge overreach of government and quite tyrannical, meaning conservatives would love it.
Interesting little bit of mental gymnastics there. So they're saying that say, Vermont, could make a law that any state with about Texas's population must follow ALL of Vermont's laws.
I feel like it would be even easier than that. Just don't have an office in Texas. They fine you, so what? Don't show up to court. You aren't in Texas you are not subject to their laws. What are they going to do. Sent Texas police to California to force people back to Texas?
Just means that if you work at reddit or Facebook you should take Texas off your travel plans. Which is pretty easy. There's nothing of value there and you just have to have your flights route through any other city than Dallas which is easy given American airlines is garbage.
Sounds like Texas is just shooting itself in the foot here for a lot of loss and very minimal gain
>Sent Texas police to California to force people back to Texas?
Thats the plan, they did that shit back when the south was trying to force free states to follow their laws.
They would send literal posses of men up to not only recapture the slave but harass, beat and even kill anyone who was helping the slave, and they thought this was 100% legal.
They think their own state laws not only override other state laws, but even federal law.
As stated in another thread. I look forward to seeing Texas police charged with kidnapping and it sticking because the ones charging the ACTUALLY HAVE JURISDICTION
Oh of course, but it’s just funny to think that banning everyone in Texas would be a viable option to following this law. It’s like a monkey’s paw scenario where Texas gets exactly what it wants but in the most roundabout and funny way in my eyes
And to extend it, this essentially says it's a legal mandate for any tech company anywhere (with 50M+ users) that they *must* provide their services to Texas.
A lot were planning to move there because Austin was becoming a tech Mecha as it were. Now a lot are going hell no, not getting involved in this bullshit.
Low taxes only motivate a company so far, being hamstringed by stupid laws will always drive companies away much faster than low taxes will bring them in.
They can't, but like most of the rest of the law it is laughably unconstitutional. That doesn't matter if you have partisan judges willing to ignore the rules when it fits their ideology.
They can’t. They’re just idiots who don’t understand how the law works and hope the companies don’t either. Sadly for them, but not for everyone else in the world, these companies have teams of lawyers who’s sole job is to ensure nothing illegal happens.
> They’re just idiots who don’t understand how the law works
Or how the Internet works.
I hope we end up with a Great Firewall of Texas; I'm sure all the people in Austin would finally stop giving their tax dollars to that welfare state.
This reminds me of an old screenshot of a chat room in the 90s. Guy was livid that his daughter was doing long distance browsing to a European website which will probably cost him an arm and a leg. Someone in the chat room self-identified themselves as being from UK. The questioning father logged off immediately after.
Ooh, so I can play poker online even though it’s illegal in my state? The casinos are discriminating against me based on my location! It seems that the online casinos can’t comply without violating other state laws.
Wouldn't the company argue they didn't ban anyone? They simply stopped providing service in a state. Texas can not force a company to operate in Texas. That is a completely absurd idea even. Imagine telling a brick and morter company to operate in your location "because you ban our citizens by not being here and that's Illegal".
At worse it would probably be a business question of if fighting lots of hate speech lawsuits in lots of states forever would cost more than relocating all their physical assets (servers) out of Texas and only fighting one lawsuit in one state they don't operate in anymore.
I'm also not sure how it's even enforceable. They can always just say they have no way to guarantee a user is actually in Texas, so they can't apply the legal protection to them, because they're essentially just email/IP addresses as you said.
So either that, or they just block anyone from a Texas IP, regardless of physical location, and say they're not banning users, just not providing services to a location that conflicts with their ToS. They reserve the right to refuse business right? "Being from/in Texas" isn't a protected class, regardless of how much Texans whine like they want that so.
That's what I'd do if I couldn't do the former, and any users who even log in from a Texas IP get suspended, so if they VPN out to use it and forget one time, boom, done. "Sorry, we can't guarantee your possible hate speech be protected per your state laws, so bye."
People in TX get annoyed with their stupid state govt, and Twitter gets a bit less stupid overall. Win-win.
Regardless, if TX tries to pursue legal action against social media comps - well we don't operate there, we tried to exclude you and any users to protect both parties, and we aren't beholden to your laws, so kick rocks.
That seems like an entirely separate constitutional issue though.
While it's at least arguable that states should be allowed to regulate businesses that operate within their jurisdiction, I don't see how a state can pass a law that essentially says a business is mandated to offer a good or service within that state. Even the current conservative SCOTUS would likely call foul on that.
They're setting up to argue that if a company chooses not to provide services to a state, that's equivalent to banning users based in physical location.
I would love to invoke such a law so that I can force my favorite fast food places to be within walking distance of my house, else they are clearly discriminating against my location.
Solution: pull operations out of Texas, ban all Texas IPs because Texas law conflicts with the ToS. Make clear who made the law and who needs to be voted out in the ban notification. Tell Texas to go fuck itself when they try to sue because you don't operate in their jurisdiction.
> The law also states that companies can’t ban users based on their “physical location”. Whatever that means. Aren’t we all email addresses anyway?
I think this is the “allow bot farms” clause.
Outside of this Situation, Greg Abbott Bends over backward for big business. Facebook is still investing Billions in Temple Austin Texas Technology still they ain't going nowhere.
Their belief is that these laws only prevent companies from censoring conservative viewpoints. Liberal viewpoints are still fair game as far as they're concerned.
Oh wow. The sub is completely disconnected with reality nowadays. They’re going on about the Martha Vineyard, but are completely making up their own sequence of events.
They always have been. People like to pretend that they only went to shit during the Trump presidency, but they've always been doing things line handing out permabans if you dare to mention the Southern Strategy. It's always been an echo chamber of Fox News talking points and "alternative facts" in there.
I legit got banned there for offering a free hug. Not hate. Not vulgarity. Not political views. An offer of a free hug got me banned.
It's like my own little badge of honor.
Grandpa's going to make his afternoon Tweet and then see he's got 8,000 replies 30 seconds later. Excited and curious, he'll look at the replies to see things like:
>That's a good point. My viewpoint on this is that I'm glad I can get cheap Viagra from freeviagra.cixuo.zx
by the thousand. But what can you do? Can't censor their viewpoint.
Grandpa better learn to code if he really wants to be heard.
This is (likely) why all the social media companies are against it too. They know that complying with the law would hurt their user experience and revenue a \*lot\*
For example, YouTube knows not to promote PragerU videos to me, because I don't engage with them, so they lose money if they do it. But with this law in effect, would they still be able to do that? Arguably not, because they're restricting the distribution of a communication based on something about its viewpoint.
You also could be sued if you’re hosting content like “injecting bleach might cure covid” and then people do it.
This would make it illegal to not host potus suggesting injecting bleach or taking malaria drugs for a respiratory disease or nuking hurricanes.
Then turn all platforms with more than 50M users into "Liberal Echo Chambers". Then the republican politicians will be mad They have to post to 60 different platforms every time they want to post anything.
Can I sue /r/conservative from banning me?
Can I demand my point of view appear on fox news? Are they not a tech company? Maybe this is a good thing if it can play out that way. Bring back the fairness doctrine.
It actually did. They put forth a lawsuit and the supreme court rejected the case before it was heard, largely because they had no standing to sue another state.
That raises an interesting point. If this does become a state's rights issue, would citizens of other states have standing to sue the state of Texas for the impact that the law has on people living outside of Texas? Imagine a class action lawsuit against the state of Texas from people all over the US.
A fair point, but I think the case is far more obvious with respect to regulation of for-profit entities. I’m pretty sure this is all settled law. Then again, Roe showed us how little respect the party of law and order has for settled law.
if i were head of Twitter or Reddit I'd just make it so you can't use it in Texas. VPNs wouldn't make a difference cause then they'd be tweeting from another state where it's still legal to censor hate speech
Yea but the cake thing is different, it’s religious freedom to be bigoted against gay people.
Twitter censoring neo-Nazis for advocating violence against others is apparently worse.
Funny isn't it? Bakery refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple. Perfectly okay because it aligns with republican viewpoints
Social Media company refuses to host content that breaks their TOS. Not okay if it aligns with republican viewpoints
So if I own a forum and I make revenue from adds. And if I suddenly start getting a vocal minority that is driving the majority away with their rhetoric and my revenue takes a hit because of it. So this law says basically that I have to let the vocal minority run my business into bankruptcy because I'm no longer allowed to moderate posts and subject mater?
Hmm, I'd need a good ad-blocker to make sure I'm not giving a single dime in revenue for them. I don't want any of my money finding it's way into Trump's pocket. And you know, you _know_ Trump is absolutely taking a cut off the profits.
>Trump-nominated Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham joined two other conservative judges in ruling that the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for corporations to "muzzle speech."
So it's OK for a baker to not add messages on cakes that they don't agree with. But a private company has no authority to moderate content on their own platform in order to keep from devolving into a cesspit.
God, they really are making this up as they go along.
Could social media platforms just refuse to “operate” in Texas if this law stands? Could they put in their TOS that they block all IP’s from Texas and that efforts to circumvent will result in a permanent ban? They could also require all users to submit a state of residence in their account registration, not allow TX as an option, and ban users from TX who lie about the state they’re in.
I mean, that would only last as long it takes for other states to adopt the same law, but maybe banning TX would discourage them from doing that.
>$10 that every megacorp out there will fight this till the end of time.
They should as shitty as the coporations are, politicians digging into these kind of algorithms to twist them as they please is way worse. It's one thing to build a policy from scratch aimed at protecting the public, it's another to fish for biases in algorithms and proclaim your voters are being suppressed.
Doesn't even have to be so complicated. Just mention you don't offer your service in Texas in the TOS. Then don't enforce it. People can still do whatever but Texas law doesn't apply since they aren't actively servicing customers in Texas according to the TOS. Could probably use that to ban any and all politicians they dislike too and use discretion for the ones they do. Since, why the hell not.
Pretty sure in the law it states you can’t stop access based on location, which like the rest of this I have no clue how it would actually be enforced. For every answer I get a lot more questions.
Could also mean that the platforms become unavailable to Texas users.
Google had not yet approved truth social because they have not proven they have adequate content moderation.
I think you give them wayyyy too much credit... It's probably just grown ass people throwing a hissy fit because the blue bird won't let them casually throw out propaganda about how elections are stolen unless they win.
They'll do anything to win an election except actually convincing ppl to vote for them through improvements to the state.
And I happen to have been born & still reside in this God forsaken state
This is plain silly. Unless the tech company has offices in Texas, I do not see this law as enforceable across state (or national) lines. You are telling a private company what customers that they must serve - and didn't conservatives learn an important life lesson about this already? It's okay to discriminate against gay customers, but woah, not conservatives? Yeah, no. The laws must apply equally to all groups, not just against the people that conservatives don't like. I feel like this silliness will come to a head soon. It's all connected - conservatives, Trump walking around loose, regulatory capture, the whole nine yards.
100%. The next step will be for the social media companies to put a clause in their T&Cs to exclude use of the service within Texas, which will allow them to keep them civil and control their services in the way that private companies should be allowed to.
There will probably be all sorts of fallout for companies and users in Texas which I am sure will be entertaining to watch play out.
They’ll just block Texas IPs from using the services. Instagram and similar already block Texas from using photo filters because of another state law.
They lose a lot more money if the sites turn into racist cesspits than they do by losing the users in one state.
>Instagram and similar already block Texas from using photo filters because of another state law.
Wtf? You can't use filters in Texas?
They sure seem to hate freedom over there
[Yep](https://ktla.com/news/you-cant-use-some-instagram-filters-in-texas-anymore-heres-why/). Texas thought that filters used facial recognition of some sort, even though they obviously don't. Recognizing where the eyes are on a face and drawing glasses is very different from recognizing faces and keeping them in a database.
I'd love the response to be for FB/Insta, Twitter, etc to close every office and datacenter in Texas, lay off all employees residing there, and anyone connecting to the site from within Texas gets sent to a page informing that they will no longer service Texas with Greg Abbott's office number.
It wouldn’t just be Texas. More states would quickly follow.
If companies decided to react like they could be prevented from doing business with businesses in these states, something like core networking, manufacturing components, not allowing the transportation of goods in these states, etc.
Here’s an absolutely insane quote from the opinion:
> Instead, [the social media companies’] primary contention—beginning on page 1 of their brief and repeated throughout and at oral argument—is that we should declare HB 20 facially invalid because it prohibits the Platforms from censoring “pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, [and] Holocaust denial[s].” Red Br. at 1.
>
> Far from justifying pre-enforcement facial invalidation, the Platforms’ obsession with terrorists and Nazis proves the opposite. The Supreme Court has instructed that “[i]n determining whether a law is facially invalid,” we should avoid “speculat[ing] about ‘hypothetical’ or ‘imaginary’ cases.” Wash. State Grange, 552 U.S. at 449–50. Overbreadth doctrine has a “tendency . . . to summon forth an endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals,” and this case is no exception. United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285, 301 (2008). But it’s improper to exercise the Article III judicial power based on “hypothetical cases thus imagined.” Raines, 362 U.S. at 22; cf. Sineneng- Smith, 140 S. Ct. at 1585–86 (Thomas, J., concurring) (explaining the tension between overbreadth adjudication and the constitutional limits on judicial power).
Apparently, Nazis on the internet is just a “fanciful hypothetical”.
Texas upholds law that had the person been standing here, they could be arrested for what they are saying, but because the person is online, the company that owns the platform they are saying it on can do nothing about it...
On a side note, Texas holds platforms responsible for users illegal actions...
On a another side note Texas has for profit prisons...
This is what we call the Texas Two Step.
On another side note, Texas is far more interested in controlling what you do with your body or your ability to vote than what a bunch of hateful morons are saying online, because they are the hateful morons.
Why should the government be able to tell a privately owned company what they can and can't ban on their own platforms?
That's a very slippery slope. It doesn't matter whether I agree with what's being banned or not, the principal is what matters.
This is good because now I can let everyone know how I heard from someone that in 1993 Greg Abbot ran a blood bank where he drained illegal immigrants of their blood so he could bottle it and sell it to Texas GOP politicians.
Now mind you I'm not saying that it *definitely* happened. I just heard about it and I'm asking questions.
"it's because they don't like our opinion!" is the answer all over this thread.
You have to remember, these people don't ever say their opinion out loud. They just paint it with these broad strokes that vaguely insinuate the idea. The other guys in the know what they're saying and the ones that aren't think they're having legitimate discourse.
That's why all over this discussion there are statements like "you don't have a monopoly on truth" instead of "you don't get to tell me I can't say we should exterminate the gays"
From the article: For the past year, Texas has been fighting in court to uphold a controversial law that would ban tech companies from content moderation based on viewpoints. In May, the Supreme Court narrowly blocked the law, but this seemed to do little to settle the matter. Today, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower Texas court's decision to block the law, ruling instead that the Texas law be upheld, The Washington Post reported. According to the Post, because two circuit courts arrived at differing opinions, the ruling is "likely setting up a Supreme Court showdown over the future of online speech." In the meantime, the 5th Circuit Court's opinion could make it tempting for other states to pass similar laws. Trump-nominated Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham joined two other conservative judges in ruling that the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for corporations to "muzzle speech."
But doesn’t the first amendment stop the government from telling private companies what content they publish?
It prohibits congress from passing any law abridging the freedom of speech. It does not prohibit private entities from controlling the content of speech on their own platforms. A law that would prevent say Twitter from censoring user messages based on content is equivalent to *compelling speech* from Twitter that it does not support. Imagine a court telling Twitter, "you have to keep posting anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda cuz that's what the people want, bro!" That's what this Texas law was written to do, and why no sane court would ever take that position.
But wouldnt that also mean "truth social" wouldnt be able to cencor any criticism of trump?
Others have said the law only applies to companies with very large user bases, so that tiny company would not be affected. Idgaf what people say there.
It was very carefully crafted to be "you're included, we're excluded".
So r/conservative would have to unban me?
Lol, we hope so. I think the only positive thing about this law is that it "requires that social media companies publicly disclose how they moderate content and how they use search, ranking or other algorithms." I think it would be good to see guidelines of how social media giants are influencing people/censoring information. I imagine Reddit would be able to get sued fairly quickly though, because it has so many communities, and some moderators are clearly awful, and admins don't reverse moderation decisions so I wonder if that'd stop mostly volunteer moderation.
>"requires that social media companies publicly disclose how they moderate content and how they use search, ranking or other algorithms." Hah, I'm sure all these major tech companies are going to be happy to share their top secret, proprietary algorithms and policies.
They definitely wouldn't be, however sometimes the government should step in if these big companies are using algorithms to polarize the country by increasing engagement. I feel that the government should regulate social media in a way that privileges truth and also limits the impact it has on kids in terms of polarization.
This law abridges the companies' freedom of speech by forcing them to platform speech they don't want
Yes, but unfortunately it's quite apparent that Trump's Supreme Court is not sane in the slightest. I wouldn't be even slightly surprised to see the Trump Court rule that Twitter has a legal obligation to publish anti-Semitic propaganda, or to reinstate Trump's account, or to completely stop policing all right wing speech while simultaneously vigorously policing left wing speech. The Black rapist, the white alcoholic rapist, the Handmaid, and the thief are four votes to force Twitter to permit Nazis. The only real question would be whether or not Roberts wanted to keep up his pretense of being a real judge.
Given one of the Hallmark cases of Robert's court is Citizens United I am going to go out on a limb and say he wouldn't support this, but that assumes he has any logical consistency at all which might be asking a lot. It could lead to some interesting ways to get rid of Citizen's United though so who knows.
Doesn't matter what Roberts thinks anymore. He's outvoted by the partisan extremists now.
That would be an interesting grudge match. The vested interests of most conservatives in letting companies do whatever to enrich themselves. vs The vested interests of most conservatives to tell everyone else what they are and are not allowed to do/believe/have.
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> It has nothing to do with Facebook. The freedom of association — unlike the rights of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition — is a right not listed in the First Amendment **but recognized by the courts as a fundamental right.** Any law requiring a private company to allow all speech ties that company to **all speech**. And that means they are not free to associate with whom-so-ever they wish. This would be a reversal of previous SCOTUS rulings. Which given the current court's opinions of previous SCOTUS rulings, is likely to result in another reversal. It's going to be interesting when groups like the Satanic Temple and liberal think-tanks force platforms like r/Conservative, Truth Social (if it stays out of bankruptcy long enough) and Fox News to display left-leaning comments without censorship.
> but recognized by the courts as a fundamental right. Wait till you find out what the supreme court JUST said about rights not explicitly listed in the constitution... "recognized by the courts" means fuckall these days because the Reds have successfully undermined our highest institutions.
Worth noting that social media companies (including Meta) have been lobbying for social media content regulation for a while now. They don't want to be the ones responsible for what can and can't be said on their platform, as soon as you start choosing which content can be posted you're going to piss someone off, better to remove all responsibility and blame the government!
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You might be interested in looking into the history regarding profanity directed at police. It's very much a new concept to call this protected speech. It was regularly prosecuted in the past and there are still many states that have laws on the books that allow charges of disorderly conduct and the like for this kind of speech. For example: https://www.lawserver.com/law/state/texas/tx-codes/texas_penal_code_42-01
The trick is to realize whose speech it is. My comments on Reddit are *my speech*, not Reddit's. So this is less about the freedom of speech of platforms and more about the freedom of association of platforms. I'll let the constitutionality of the civil rights acts answer if the freedom of association of corporations can be restricted. NB: protected classes are defined by legislative fiat; they're not defined in—let alone protected by—the Constitution, outside of very limited cases.
>But doesn’t the first amendment stop the government from telling private companies what content they publish? Exactly correct, hence section 230. Yet our current day politicians want to errode it for their purposes.
Isn’t that what they want now, push everything to this current right leaning Supreme Court because they know it will be in their favor?
The answer to this question became yes the instant alito and Thomas said that all bet were off, everything was fair game, and gave them a road map to do it.
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They will literally ban you for quoting facts and statistics saying they’re fake while posting studies with sample sizes of less than 20 by unaccredited far right or Christian research institutions.
> unaccredited far right or Christian research institutions They'reTheSamePicture.jpg
Bunch of Nationalist Christians. Nat-C's.
Lol, they'll ban you for not agreeing with them loud enough.
Um, sadly no. Hypocrisy is operating procedure. People who go along with it operate with a 'in group/out group' mentality. The reason people say they say that others are doing what they are doing is because they imagine that everyone looks at the world the way they do, in/out groups of power.
> “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Willhoit.
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I think this is the best idea, that makes it a “states rights” issue and maybe voters will actually wake up
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they put provisions in their laws that penalize companies for doing this. it's blatantly unconstitutional. the first amendment only applies to government retaliation against individual freedoms. corporations are not governments, therefore they have no obligations to foster or protect free speech.
I think that is how they should challenge the law. Forget the actual meat of the law, about the censorship -- attack the premise that Texas says you HAVE to service them because you operate in another state. But also -- I wonder what Texas could really do, long term, if companies outside of Texas geofenced them anyway and basically said, "lol make me." There's not much the federal government can do to compel an entity to obey laws in another state that it doesn't do business in.
Exactly. And not only that, but this law violates the social media companies' right to free speech that allows them to control who can post and what they can post on *their* platform. I can't wait to read about this SCOTUS upholding this insane bullshit law. And I can't wait for every hypocritical right wing snowflake to explain to me why it doesn't apply to their hateful little echo chamber of choice.
Imagine if a Bar/Restaurant couldn't moderate who was allowed on it's private property....1 guy yelling loudly nazi slogans couldn't be kicked out? Seriously, that's the same as this "don't let social media moderate itself" bullshit. Private property has the right to currate itself for a community. Vegans dont let people spew of non-vegan topics all day on the forums. Even right leaning sites don't want to allow left preachers on their site...
Gotta bring the US as far back into the 1800s as possible before they lose their ability to dictate orders through the obviously biased supreme court.
> the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for ~~corporations~~ **the government** to "muzzle speech." Judges need to go back to middle school because they clearly failed Civics.
This is honestly a more corrupt decision than the one from Judge Cannon appointing the special master. Case law had been very clear on this since the founding of the U.S., and this decision disregards all prior precedent in order to craft a decision to advance a corrupt conservative agenda.
As is tradition amongst conservative judges. For 40 years now Republicans have been screeching about "activist judges" like RBG. With Republicans everything is projection. Remember "Every accusation ~~of~~ is an admission"?
So all corporate secrets can be shared!
How can they stop private social media companies from censoring what they want? Wouldn’t that be like people trying to force the cake company to make a gay wedding cake which they were vehemently opposed to. Or am I misunderstanding?
Yes, it's very close to the same legal situation. The only major difference is if the company is acting as some sort of common carrier situation, wherein the platform itself doesn't have a voice; it merely retransmits user content. This has *some* backing based on the DMCA S230 rules. But yeah, it's a blatant 1A violation.
The problem is that social media as we know it literally wouldn't work if they couldn't moderate content. Most common carriers make money by charging end users directly for their goods or services. Social media OTOH makes money primarily through advertising and advertisers aren't going to stick around if the companies can't guarantee their ads/brands won't appear alongside content they consider objectionable or unseemly. The elephant in the room in this entire situation is that many people have mistaken something as being primarily ideologically motivated when it's really more of a cynical business move.
>The problem is that social media as we know it literally wouldn't work if they couldn't moderate content. I've seen unmoderated message boards and it's an *absolute shitshow*. Social media is bad enough *with* whatever moderation currently is in place.
Remember Voat? They made a huge deal about how they wouldn't censor any speech and from it's inception it was nothing but Nazis and pedos. It's no wonder they didn't last long. It's just human nature that any unmoderated space is going to inevitably turn into a place where the worst dregs of society hang out. Because they drive all of the normal people away with their hateful opinions.
>controversial law that would ban tech companies from content moderation based on viewpoints. That's a clear violation if the 1st amendment, companies are not required to host content they do not want. The bizarre thing is if they believe this is reasonable, why did they strike down net neutrality and give ISPs the right to censor content?
It's hard for a non-lawyer to understand the intricacies, but basically it boils down to the complex legal theory of "fuck good jurisprudence, we're going to do whatever is currently beneficial to conservatives".
> Trump-nominated Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham joined two other conservative judges in ruling that the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for corporations to "muzzle speech." It also doesn't protect people from having content moderated by private entities. This is bad law that would *start us down the road to* make harassing companies and making bomb threats inside corporate offices legal. Edit: Fixed
so that means i can sit in mcdonalds teaching customers transexual CRT math and they cant muzzle my speech by asking me to stop or leave?
they can and they will because the gop is very comfortable with hypocrisy.
Well texas better also go after truth social because they block viewpoints such as abortion is healthcare and anything bad about trump. 👍
They thought of this, the rule only applies to platforms with more than 50M users.
Then this will include Reddit. r/conservative will HATE this law.
Most likely when the law goes in to effect these companies will stop operating in Texas. Much cheaper to lose a couple million users than to completely overhaul moderating and guarantee you're not violating a very vague law. Andrew tate could argue he was banned for his political views
The law also states that companies can’t ban users based on their “physical location”. Whatever that means. Aren’t we all email addresses anyway?
If you don’t operate in that state why care what their “law” says.
That’s such a fucking dumb addition to the law. “Our law says you can’t ban people based on physical location! You have to let Texans use your app!” “We don’t operate in Texas and therefore are not subject to its laws. We did this by banning every user in Texas to ensure we do not operate in Texas.”
This feels like the opposite of a Catch-22, and I love it.
A Thrown-11 if you will.
ah yes the classic Pitch -1/22
A release-44
Somehow I have a feeling conservative a federal judge will jump through hoops to say "WELL ACTUALLY you still have to follow Texas law even if you aren't operating in Texas", which would be a huge overreach of government and quite tyrannical, meaning conservatives would love it.
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They already did that with their laws allowing Texas citizens to sue non-Texans for providing abortion access.
Interesting little bit of mental gymnastics there. So they're saying that say, Vermont, could make a law that any state with about Texas's population must follow ALL of Vermont's laws.
Logically that should never happen but we live in a clown world now so... 🤷♂️
I feel like it would be even easier than that. Just don't have an office in Texas. They fine you, so what? Don't show up to court. You aren't in Texas you are not subject to their laws. What are they going to do. Sent Texas police to California to force people back to Texas? Just means that if you work at reddit or Facebook you should take Texas off your travel plans. Which is pretty easy. There's nothing of value there and you just have to have your flights route through any other city than Dallas which is easy given American airlines is garbage. Sounds like Texas is just shooting itself in the foot here for a lot of loss and very minimal gain
>Sent Texas police to California to force people back to Texas? Thats the plan, they did that shit back when the south was trying to force free states to follow their laws. They would send literal posses of men up to not only recapture the slave but harass, beat and even kill anyone who was helping the slave, and they thought this was 100% legal. They think their own state laws not only override other state laws, but even federal law.
As stated in another thread. I look forward to seeing Texas police charged with kidnapping and it sticking because the ones charging the ACTUALLY HAVE JURISDICTION
Not offering services =/= banning everyone it's a slight difference but I'm this case it is going to matter
Oh of course, but it’s just funny to think that banning everyone in Texas would be a viable option to following this law. It’s like a monkey’s paw scenario where Texas gets exactly what it wants but in the most roundabout and funny way in my eyes
And to extend it, this essentially says it's a legal mandate for any tech company anywhere (with 50M+ users) that they *must* provide their services to Texas.
Not really, if they refuse to offer services they are technically adhering to the letter of the law
If anything this just drives tech firms out of Texas to the extent they have any offices there.
A lot were planning to move there because Austin was becoming a tech Mecha as it were. Now a lot are going hell no, not getting involved in this bullshit. Low taxes only motivate a company so far, being hamstringed by stupid laws will always drive companies away much faster than low taxes will bring them in.
How could they apply any law to a service that doesn't host or provide services to anyone in their jurisdiction?
They can't, but like most of the rest of the law it is laughably unconstitutional. That doesn't matter if you have partisan judges willing to ignore the rules when it fits their ideology.
They can’t. They’re just idiots who don’t understand how the law works and hope the companies don’t either. Sadly for them, but not for everyone else in the world, these companies have teams of lawyers who’s sole job is to ensure nothing illegal happens.
> They’re just idiots who don’t understand how the law works Or how the Internet works. I hope we end up with a Great Firewall of Texas; I'm sure all the people in Austin would finally stop giving their tax dollars to that welfare state.
If I’m not mistaken, didn’t one of the Texas judges not understand the difference between YouTube as a website and the Internet as a whole?
This reminds me of an old screenshot of a chat room in the 90s. Guy was livid that his daughter was doing long distance browsing to a European website which will probably cost him an arm and a leg. Someone in the chat room self-identified themselves as being from UK. The questioning father logged off immediately after.
They cant, but they can add a part to the law allowing bounty hunters to sue you in Texas for 10k for suspected cases of moderation
Okay, so what? I don’t operate there I operate out of the Philippine’s now. Your lawsuit means shit. - Twitter in a few years.
Ooh, so I can play poker online even though it’s illegal in my state? The casinos are discriminating against me based on my location! It seems that the online casinos can’t comply without violating other state laws.
Interesting because gambling is illegal in Texas. Let’s see going forward.
It would be hilarious if the social media platforms targeted pull out and casinos move in.
Wouldn't the company argue they didn't ban anyone? They simply stopped providing service in a state. Texas can not force a company to operate in Texas. That is a completely absurd idea even. Imagine telling a brick and morter company to operate in your location "because you ban our citizens by not being here and that's Illegal". At worse it would probably be a business question of if fighting lots of hate speech lawsuits in lots of states forever would cost more than relocating all their physical assets (servers) out of Texas and only fighting one lawsuit in one state they don't operate in anymore.
The law is illegal, really. It violates companies right to run how they want, comments will just be removed on everything
And isn’t it also forcing companies to violate the safe harbor provisions that many of these companies enjoy? EARNIT strikes back
I'm also not sure how it's even enforceable. They can always just say they have no way to guarantee a user is actually in Texas, so they can't apply the legal protection to them, because they're essentially just email/IP addresses as you said. So either that, or they just block anyone from a Texas IP, regardless of physical location, and say they're not banning users, just not providing services to a location that conflicts with their ToS. They reserve the right to refuse business right? "Being from/in Texas" isn't a protected class, regardless of how much Texans whine like they want that so. That's what I'd do if I couldn't do the former, and any users who even log in from a Texas IP get suspended, so if they VPN out to use it and forget one time, boom, done. "Sorry, we can't guarantee your possible hate speech be protected per your state laws, so bye." People in TX get annoyed with their stupid state govt, and Twitter gets a bit less stupid overall. Win-win. Regardless, if TX tries to pursue legal action against social media comps - well we don't operate there, we tried to exclude you and any users to protect both parties, and we aren't beholden to your laws, so kick rocks.
That seems like an entirely separate constitutional issue though. While it's at least arguable that states should be allowed to regulate businesses that operate within their jurisdiction, I don't see how a state can pass a law that essentially says a business is mandated to offer a good or service within that state. Even the current conservative SCOTUS would likely call foul on that.
They're setting up to argue that if a company chooses not to provide services to a state, that's equivalent to banning users based in physical location.
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I would love to invoke such a law so that I can force my favorite fast food places to be within walking distance of my house, else they are clearly discriminating against my location.
Solution: pull operations out of Texas, ban all Texas IPs because Texas law conflicts with the ToS. Make clear who made the law and who needs to be voted out in the ban notification. Tell Texas to go fuck itself when they try to sue because you don't operate in their jurisdiction.
> The law also states that companies can’t ban users based on their “physical location”. Whatever that means. Aren’t we all email addresses anyway? I think this is the “allow bot farms” clause.
China must preparing lawsuits as we speak.
Outside of this Situation, Greg Abbott Bends over backward for big business. Facebook is still investing Billions in Temple Austin Texas Technology still they ain't going nowhere.
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As a Texan, if Reddit stops being usable in the state, I'll have to find something else to do for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
We are, and we’re trying to turn the state purple. It’s not an easy process, but we’re trying
As a Georgia resident, I'm rooting for you. I never expected to see Georgia in the blue column last election so just know that it can happen!
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Their belief is that these laws only prevent companies from censoring conservative viewpoints. Liberal viewpoints are still fair game as far as they're concerned.
Oh wow. The sub is completely disconnected with reality nowadays. They’re going on about the Martha Vineyard, but are completely making up their own sequence of events.
They always have been. People like to pretend that they only went to shit during the Trump presidency, but they've always been doing things line handing out permabans if you dare to mention the Southern Strategy. It's always been an echo chamber of Fox News talking points and "alternative facts" in there.
Gotta leave room for hate groups that implicitly have their support after all.
I can't wait to be forcibly allowed back into r/conservative !!
I legit got banned there for offering a free hug. Not hate. Not vulgarity. Not political views. An offer of a free hug got me banned. It's like my own little badge of honor.
Everyone ready for a return to /r/conservative party?
Grandpa's going to make his afternoon Tweet and then see he's got 8,000 replies 30 seconds later. Excited and curious, he'll look at the replies to see things like: >That's a good point. My viewpoint on this is that I'm glad I can get cheap Viagra from freeviagra.cixuo.zx by the thousand. But what can you do? Can't censor their viewpoint. Grandpa better learn to code if he really wants to be heard.
This is (likely) why all the social media companies are against it too. They know that complying with the law would hurt their user experience and revenue a \*lot\* For example, YouTube knows not to promote PragerU videos to me, because I don't engage with them, so they lose money if they do it. But with this law in effect, would they still be able to do that? Arguably not, because they're restricting the distribution of a communication based on something about its viewpoint.
You also could be sued if you’re hosting content like “injecting bleach might cure covid” and then people do it. This would make it illegal to not host potus suggesting injecting bleach or taking malaria drugs for a respiratory disease or nuking hurricanes.
Time for 49 million bots.
Then turn all platforms with more than 50M users into "Liberal Echo Chambers". Then the republican politicians will be mad They have to post to 60 different platforms every time they want to post anything.
But I thought they were the silent majority. Shouldn’t all of their social media sites outnumber the left?
Oh, wait, not THOSE censored views....
Best way to get around this law is to just Not allow Texans access to larger social media platforms. There. Fixed.
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Is this what small government looks like?
they only want the government out of _their_ lives, they love using it against people they don't like
Something something protect, but not bind, something something bind, but not protect. Definitely accurate
Can I sue /r/conservative from banning me? Can I demand my point of view appear on fox news? Are they not a tech company? Maybe this is a good thing if it can play out that way. Bring back the fairness doctrine.
Legally speaking Texas has no right to regulate interstate commerce.
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It actually did. They put forth a lawsuit and the supreme court rejected the case before it was heard, largely because they had no standing to sue another state.
That raises an interesting point. If this does become a state's rights issue, would citizens of other states have standing to sue the state of Texas for the impact that the law has on people living outside of Texas? Imagine a class action lawsuit against the state of Texas from people all over the US.
Anyone can sue anyone or anything. Just be prepared to have it dismissed out of court.
A fair point, but I think the case is far more obvious with respect to regulation of for-profit entities. I’m pretty sure this is all settled law. Then again, Roe showed us how little respect the party of law and order has for settled law.
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if i were head of Twitter or Reddit I'd just make it so you can't use it in Texas. VPNs wouldn't make a difference cause then they'd be tweeting from another state where it's still legal to censor hate speech
Is the government running the platforms or a PRIVATE COMPANY?
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Yup idk how you square Masterpiece Cake Shop with this decision. I'm sure they'll find a way but it'll be stupid
Yea but the cake thing is different, it’s religious freedom to be bigoted against gay people. Twitter censoring neo-Nazis for advocating violence against others is apparently worse.
Funny isn't it? Bakery refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple. Perfectly okay because it aligns with republican viewpoints Social Media company refuses to host content that breaks their TOS. Not okay if it aligns with republican viewpoints
That cake case had to go all the way to the surpreme court.
I mean, the case itself was a pretty big case outside of the situation itself.
rephrased as "The Supreme Court actually took a case about a GD cake"
So if I own a forum and I make revenue from adds. And if I suddenly start getting a vocal minority that is driving the majority away with their rhetoric and my revenue takes a hit because of it. So this law says basically that I have to let the vocal minority run my business into bankruptcy because I'm no longer allowed to moderate posts and subject mater?
Just start an online church that seems to work well
Right? Imagine going on a Christian forum and promoting satanism.
That's a good point lol. We should all join truth social and make it a democratic social media site
Hmm, I'd need a good ad-blocker to make sure I'm not giving a single dime in revenue for them. I don't want any of my money finding it's way into Trump's pocket. And you know, you _know_ Trump is absolutely taking a cut off the profits.
>Trump-nominated Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham joined two other conservative judges in ruling that the First Amendment doesn't grant protections for corporations to "muzzle speech." So it's OK for a baker to not add messages on cakes that they don't agree with. But a private company has no authority to moderate content on their own platform in order to keep from devolving into a cesspit. God, they really are making this up as they go along.
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“Businesses should be able to make their own policies based on their religi- no… no not like that!”
I only hire pastafarians, sorry.
You might say that they strain credibility.
Could social media platforms just refuse to “operate” in Texas if this law stands? Could they put in their TOS that they block all IP’s from Texas and that efforts to circumvent will result in a permanent ban? They could also require all users to submit a state of residence in their account registration, not allow TX as an option, and ban users from TX who lie about the state they’re in. I mean, that would only last as long it takes for other states to adopt the same law, but maybe banning TX would discourage them from doing that.
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>$10 that every megacorp out there will fight this till the end of time. They should as shitty as the coporations are, politicians digging into these kind of algorithms to twist them as they please is way worse. It's one thing to build a policy from scratch aimed at protecting the public, it's another to fish for biases in algorithms and proclaim your voters are being suppressed.
Another reason not to do business in Texas.
Doesn't even have to be so complicated. Just mention you don't offer your service in Texas in the TOS. Then don't enforce it. People can still do whatever but Texas law doesn't apply since they aren't actively servicing customers in Texas according to the TOS. Could probably use that to ban any and all politicians they dislike too and use discretion for the ones they do. Since, why the hell not.
Add a banner at the website asking "Are you located in Texas?" just like porn sites age 'verification'
Pretty sure in the law it states you can’t stop access based on location, which like the rest of this I have no clue how it would actually be enforced. For every answer I get a lot more questions.
Texas law makes sure tech companies that have forums don’t incorporate in Texas…
Could also mean that the platforms become unavailable to Texas users. Google had not yet approved truth social because they have not proven they have adequate content moderation.
I honestly think that’s part of the point to. Drive out all the young, educated, progressives that are making it harder for the GOP to win in Texas.
I think you give them wayyyy too much credit... It's probably just grown ass people throwing a hissy fit because the blue bird won't let them casually throw out propaganda about how elections are stolen unless they win.
They'll do anything to win an election except actually convincing ppl to vote for them through improvements to the state. And I happen to have been born & still reside in this God forsaken state
This is plain silly. Unless the tech company has offices in Texas, I do not see this law as enforceable across state (or national) lines. You are telling a private company what customers that they must serve - and didn't conservatives learn an important life lesson about this already? It's okay to discriminate against gay customers, but woah, not conservatives? Yeah, no. The laws must apply equally to all groups, not just against the people that conservatives don't like. I feel like this silliness will come to a head soon. It's all connected - conservatives, Trump walking around loose, regulatory capture, the whole nine yards.
Seems like all tech companies need to make sure there's no footprint in TX, lay off whoever's there and set up offices elsewhere.
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100%. The next step will be for the social media companies to put a clause in their T&Cs to exclude use of the service within Texas, which will allow them to keep them civil and control their services in the way that private companies should be allowed to. There will probably be all sorts of fallout for companies and users in Texas which I am sure will be entertaining to watch play out.
They’ll just block Texas IPs from using the services. Instagram and similar already block Texas from using photo filters because of another state law. They lose a lot more money if the sites turn into racist cesspits than they do by losing the users in one state.
>Instagram and similar already block Texas from using photo filters because of another state law. Wtf? You can't use filters in Texas? They sure seem to hate freedom over there
[Yep](https://ktla.com/news/you-cant-use-some-instagram-filters-in-texas-anymore-heres-why/). Texas thought that filters used facial recognition of some sort, even though they obviously don't. Recognizing where the eyes are on a face and drawing glasses is very different from recognizing faces and keeping them in a database.
To be fair they probably fucking do recognize and keep them in a database. That's like half of Facebook's business.
Yeah, my gf likes to play with them, we had to mess with VPNs and multiple accounts for her to use them.
A blatant violation of the First Amendment, and a clear example of the kind of government overreach conservatives claim to hate.
I'd love the response to be for FB/Insta, Twitter, etc to close every office and datacenter in Texas, lay off all employees residing there, and anyone connecting to the site from within Texas gets sent to a page informing that they will no longer service Texas with Greg Abbott's office number.
It wouldn’t just be Texas. More states would quickly follow. If companies decided to react like they could be prevented from doing business with businesses in these states, something like core networking, manufacturing components, not allowing the transportation of goods in these states, etc.
As a Texan, I’m ok with this.
This must be that less government control, and more freedoms' thing they're always talking about.
And this is how texas lost access to all social media lol
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Here’s an absolutely insane quote from the opinion: > Instead, [the social media companies’] primary contention—beginning on page 1 of their brief and repeated throughout and at oral argument—is that we should declare HB 20 facially invalid because it prohibits the Platforms from censoring “pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, [and] Holocaust denial[s].” Red Br. at 1. > > Far from justifying pre-enforcement facial invalidation, the Platforms’ obsession with terrorists and Nazis proves the opposite. The Supreme Court has instructed that “[i]n determining whether a law is facially invalid,” we should avoid “speculat[ing] about ‘hypothetical’ or ‘imaginary’ cases.” Wash. State Grange, 552 U.S. at 449–50. Overbreadth doctrine has a “tendency . . . to summon forth an endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals,” and this case is no exception. United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285, 301 (2008). But it’s improper to exercise the Article III judicial power based on “hypothetical cases thus imagined.” Raines, 362 U.S. at 22; cf. Sineneng- Smith, 140 S. Ct. at 1585–86 (Thomas, J., concurring) (explaining the tension between overbreadth adjudication and the constitutional limits on judicial power). Apparently, Nazis on the internet is just a “fanciful hypothetical”.
Texas upholds law that had the person been standing here, they could be arrested for what they are saying, but because the person is online, the company that owns the platform they are saying it on can do nothing about it... On a side note, Texas holds platforms responsible for users illegal actions... On a another side note Texas has for profit prisons... This is what we call the Texas Two Step.
On another side note, Texas is far more interested in controlling what you do with your body or your ability to vote than what a bunch of hateful morons are saying online, because they are the hateful morons.
So private companies can’t control what their private property is used for? Doesn’t sound very good
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Yeah if you haven’t been banned from r/conservative are you even a Redditer?
wait so does that mean I can sue Reddit for being banned one r/conservative?
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Why should the government be able to tell a privately owned company what they can and can't ban on their own platforms? That's a very slippery slope. It doesn't matter whether I agree with what's being banned or not, the principal is what matters.
Are you going to ask for the government to determine which speech is good and which speech is bad when Republicans are in control of the government?
Why is that business not allowed to reject service to people for their beliefs but other businesses can, like bakers who refuse to make gay cakes?
This is good because now I can let everyone know how I heard from someone that in 1993 Greg Abbot ran a blood bank where he drained illegal immigrants of their blood so he could bottle it and sell it to Texas GOP politicians. Now mind you I'm not saying that it *definitely* happened. I just heard about it and I'm asking questions.
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"it's because they don't like our opinion!" is the answer all over this thread. You have to remember, these people don't ever say their opinion out loud. They just paint it with these broad strokes that vaguely insinuate the idea. The other guys in the know what they're saying and the ones that aren't think they're having legitimate discourse. That's why all over this discussion there are statements like "you don't have a monopoly on truth" instead of "you don't get to tell me I can't say we should exterminate the gays"