Mediaboss Marketing

by Dennis Crouch

Texas HB20 treats social media platforms as common carriers, especially those with very large number of users and market dominance. For its purposes, the law focuses on platforms with more than 50 million US monthly users and has a number of disclosure requirements. But, the heart of the new law is its prohibition on censorship.

CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media platform may not censor a user, a users expression, or a users ability to receive the expression of another person based on: (1) the viewpoint of the user or another person; (2) the viewpoint represented in the users expression or another persons expression; or (3) a users geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

Censor means to block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.

HB 20. The rule has a few exceptions. Censorship appears OK if done to protect intellectual property rights; based upon a request from an organization with the purpose of preventing the sexual exploitation of children and protecting survivors of sexual abuse from ongoing harassment or if user expression directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group because of their race, color, disability, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, sex, or status as a peace officer or judge. The law creates a private right of action for a censored user and also authorizes the state Attorney General to bring action.

The new law was passed by the Republican dominated Texas House and Senate and signed by Gov. Abbott back in 2021. But, before the law became effective a Federal District Court entered a preliminary injunction against its enforcement. Ordinarily, appeals are only proper after final judgment. One exception though is that a district courts decision regarding a preliminary injunction is ordinarily immediately appealable. And so the state of Texas has appealed the Preliminary Injunction to the 5th Circuit.

The news over the past two weeks: On May 9, the 5th Circuit heard oral arguments and two days laterissued a 1-sentence decision staying the preliminary injunction pending appeal (as the State requested). Here, the judges have not issued their final decision on whether the preliminary injunction was proper, but the stay suggests that their final decision will also favor Texas since a key element of relief here is likelihood of success on the merits. Those opposing the law have filed an emergency request with the US Supreme Court to reinstate the preliminary injunction during the appeal. Justice Alito is assigned to the Fifth Circuit region and so is set to decide the emergency petitionhowever, the full court could choose to weigh-in. Briefing in the SCOTUS case from Texas is due on May 18.

So to be clear, the decisions thus far have all focused on preliminary relief whether the law can be enforced while the trial & appeal is ongoing.

In prior cases, the Court has treated social media has an important avenue for speech. In Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730 (2017), for instance, the court found that prohibiting prior sex offenders from all social media violated those individuals speech rights since social media is the modern public square. Id. Here though, it is the social media platforms seeking the right to discriminate freely against viewpoints. Texas presents the argument that social media platforms are not speaking through their editorial role, but rather are taking technological actions to present the speech of others. Of course, publishing and dissemination of speech are also protected by the First Amendment, and those opposed to the law present this as an open-and-shut case.

From the moment users access a social media platform, everything they see is subject to editorial discretion by the platform in accordance with the platforms unique policies. Platforms dynamically create curated combinations of user-submitted expression, the platforms own expression, and advertisements. This editorial process involves prioritizing, arranging, and recommending content according to what users would like to see, how users would like to see it, and what content reflects (what the platform believes to be) accurate or interesting information.

SCT Brief.

Original post:
HB20: Social Media Censorship and the Supreme Court - Patently-O

One hashtag calling for the feature to be revoked quickly accumulated 8,000 posts and was viewed more than 100 million times before it was censored in late April. A university student in Zhejiang province sued Weibo, the Chinese social platform, in March for leaking personal information without his consent when the platform automatically showed his location. Others have pointed out the hypocrisy of the practice, since celebrities, government accounts, and the chief executive of Weibo have all been exempted from the location tags.

Despite the pushback, the authorities have signaled the changes are likely to last. An article in the state-run publication, China Comment, argued the location labels were necessary to cut off the black hand manipulating the narratives behind the internet cable. A draft regulation from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the countrys internet regulator, stipulates that user I.P. addresses must be displayed in a prominent way.

If censorship is about dealing with the messages and those who send the messages, this mechanism is really working on the audience, said Han Rongbin, a media and politics professor at the University of Georgia.

With the worsening relationship with United States and China and propaganda repeatedly blaming malign foreign forces for dissatisfaction in China, Mr. Han said the new policy could be quite effective at snuffing out complaints.

People worrying about foreign interference is a tendency right now. Thats why it works better than censorship. People buy it, he said.

An uncertain harvest. Chinese officials are issuing warnings that, after heavy rainfalls last autumn, a disappointing winter wheat harvestin June could drive food prices already high because of the war in Ukraine and bad weather in Asia and the United States further up, compounding hunger in the worlds poorest countries.

A pause on wealth redistribution. For much of last year, Chinas top leader, Xi Jinping, waged a fierce campaign to narrow social inequalitiesand usher in a new era of common prosperity. Now, as the economic outlook is increasingly clouded, the Communist Party is putting its campaign on the back burner.

The vitriol can be overwhelming. One Chinese citizen, Mr. Li, who spoke on the condition that only his surname be used for privacy reasons, was targeted by trolls after his profile was linked to the United States, where he lived. Nationalist influencers accused him of working from overseas to incite protest in western China over a post that criticized the local government of handling a students sudden death. The accounts listed him and several others as examples of spy infiltration. A post to publicly shame them was liked 100,000 times before it was eventually censored.

Inundated by derogatory messages, he had to change his Weibo user name to stop harassers from tracing him. Even though he has used Weibo for more than 10 years, he is wary of the baseless attacks these days. They want me to shut up, so Ill shut up, Mr. Li said.

Continue reading here:
Chinas Internet Censors Try a New Trick: Revealing Users Locations - The New York Times

WASHINGTON, D.C. More than a dozen states have new laws prohibiting schools from teaching certain topics in the classroom, including lessons related to racism, bias, and LGBTQ+ topics.

This week, Congress reviewed these policies and heard some passionate statements from several high school students about this issue.

Krisha Ramani, a high school student from Michigan, told lawmakers she has seen firsthand how some of these new policies are affecting her education.

Gen Z has the capacity and more importantly the willingness to learn about the issues affecting us, said Ramani. We want to participate in these tough conversations. We want to read about the diverse perspectives affecting us and efforts to regulate what can be taught in the classroom is an insult to a young persons ability to understand nuanced arguments.

These students are urging Congress to preserve their freedom of speech and protect their teachers.

Some of these new state laws will punish teachers who violate them.

Something has gone very wrong when teachers think they will be fired for supporting the concept of diversity, said Claire Mengel, a high school student from Ohio. Most critically students of color are being told by the highest authority in the district that their stories dont deserve to take up school time, school grounds or school resources.

Many Democrats believe these laws are undermining public education by banning literature, historical concepts and other classroom materials.

But some Republicans say these policies are set up to increase parental rights and transparency.

Our childrens innocence should be protected and prioritized and along with their potential for their personal and academic success, said Rep. Nancy Mace (R South Carolina).

Rep. Mace believes schools should focus on supporting students, especially those who are suffering from COVID-19 learning loss.

Our children should not be taught that they are oppressors or that they are victims merely based on the color of their skin. Instead, we should re-double down on our efforts to ensure that our children have the foundation to achieve their best and full potential, said Rep. Mace.

Some educators say these new laws are also contributing to the teacher shortage because its harder to recruit staff.

Congress working on legislation to help workers recover stolen wages

2022 Cox Media Group

Continued here:
Students share growing concerns over classroom censorship with Congress - WPXI Pittsburgh

Facebook held a conference call Tuesday to discuss which posts they most often remove and why, which was inconveniently timed after the weekends Buffalo mass shooting video was still on the platform.

One of the many depressing aspects of Saturdays racist mass shooting in Buffalo was how the grisly video proliferated on social networks. According to CNN, the shooter livestreamed it on Twitch, and to that streaming platforms great credit, the stream was cut off within two minutes. The Washington Post reports that only 22 people saw it.

But eventually Facebook enters the picture. Clearly some (if not all) of those 22 viewers were horrible white supremacist trolls, because according to the New York Times, the video was was posted on a site called Streamable and viewed more than three million times before it was removed. And a link to that video was shared hundreds of times across Facebook and Twitter hours after the shooting.

As of Tuesday, there were still a few copies of the video floating around on Facebook, according to that Washington Post report. And this is the unfortunate backdrop against which Facebook released a quarterly report on which posts they remove and why, as The Verge explains.

The report was accompanied by a conference call, as Facebooks parent company Meta now has these calls and reports quarterly, not long after the company's earnings calls. The call was scheduled well before the shooting took place, but obviously, Meta had some explaining to do.

People create new versions and new external links to try to evade our policies, vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said, according to AdWeek. We will continue to learn, refine our processes and refine our systems to ensure that we can take down these links more quickly in the future. Its only a couple of days after the incident, so we dont have any more to share at this point.

Meta also released the Facebook quarterly community standards enforcement report, which The Verge describes as a document that has a boring name, but is full of delight for those of us who are nosy and enjoy reading about the failures of artificial-intelligence systems.

And yes, human moderators are much better at recognizing genuinely problematic posts than bot moderators. Facebook counts up the posts they admit were wrongfully removed, and the bots wrongfully remove posts more frequently than human moderators. No surprise there.

What is a surprise, at least in the context of the current Big Tech censorship discourse, is that very little political speech is removed. The Verge sifted through the removed-post numbers and concluded Very little of it is political, at least in the sense of commentary about current events. Instead, its posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, and bullying and harassment.

These are Facebooks own numbers, and not independently verified, so take that into account. But some standout numbers are that Facebook removed 1.6 billion fake accounts, and 2.5 million posts labeled "Terrorism and Organized Hate."

The current conservative horseshit grievances about Facebook censorship try to frame this as an attempt to attack free speech, all done by a company where Left Coast Liberals are supposedly in charge. This is a huge part of Elon Musks Twitter takeover discourse (to whatever degree said takeover is actually happening). And while I hate to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, its pretty clear that the censorship claims are driven by bad-faith attempts to blur the line between political speech and actual violence. But since those bad-faith efforts have proven an excellent political talking point, there is no amount of transparency from Facebook that will likely change this.

Related: Facebook Relaxes (and Then Reverses) Its Rules Over Calling for Leaders to Be Killed, Because of Putin [SFist]

Image: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash

See the article here:
Facebook Releases Report On Which Posts They Remove and Censor, Turns Out Most Aren't Political - SFist

Re Virginia Beach School Board group removes Gender Queer book from libraries, calls it pervasively vulgar (May 16): As both a Virginia Beach citizen and librarian, I find the removal of this book very concerning. This act is censorship, plain and simple. Is the book for everyone? No. Will some kids be able to identify with it, maybe find some answers in it, and feel less alone? Yes.

Heres the thing, there are lots of books in the library that have content I find objectionable. Yes, Im an adult, but what I think is missing in these censorship cases is that if you find your kid has been reading something you dont agree with, that is a huge opportunity to discuss the book or topic with your child. You may discover they still have questions. They might share how they are feeling. You can share, this is what our family believes and why.

Banning books doesnt make a childs questions dissolve, doesnt bolster what is often fragile self-esteem, doesnt help build their critical thinking skills, and doesnt help the child learn to navigate the world with all its variety of people and ideas. Teens are uniquely positioned to discover their identities and books are, or should be, an amazingly nonjudgmental method for them to learn. Finally, do you honestly think reading something will change your sexual preference? No. It wouldnt work for you, and it doesnt work like that for your kids. Stop with the homophobia.

Tamara Sarg, Virginia Beach

Re Forced out: Closure of Newport News airports mobile home park throws residents lives into turmoil (May 15): What have we come to in this country when we no longer have any compassion for the least of our countrymen and place greed and profit over every other human consideration? The Peninsula Airport Commission should reverse the shameful, unilateral, patently cruel and uncaring decision of the Airport Executive Director Mike Giardino and guarantee the occupants of mobile homes in the airport commission-owned mobile home park that their tenancy is safe and will not be uprooted.

It isnt being socialist to think that we all have some responsibility for our fellow citizens, especially those at the base of the economic pyramid. Were already losing our identity as caring Americans in the face of the terrible divisions in our country, and this has to stop somewhere. I urge everyone reading this letter to contribute to the legal defense fund for the mobile home occupants being handled by Newport News attorney Nathaniel J. Webb III. I intend to do so.

Anthony R. Santoro, Yorktown

Re Newport News budget includes first real estate tax reduction since 2008 (May 11): Thanks a lot, Newport News City Council, for reducing the tax rate on real estate by 1.6% ($1.22 to $1.20 per $100), when my assessment has increased 38% since 2018 and 24% in just the past two years.

And thanks to Council member Patricia Woodbury for wanting a larger reduction but voting for this one anyway. It reminded me of using the, all the other kids were doing it defense as a kid when I did something stupid, and of having my mother ask me, If all the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?

Charles Wilson, Newport News

Now that politicians, columnists and others are saying it is okay to protest in neighborhoods, it is time for them to give out their addresses. This way people who disagree with them can protest in front of their homes. Or how about making any opinion on anything include the persons actual name and address with it?

It just seems we no longer have the right to be civil to others and to disagree without going to the nth degree. Americans have allowed so much to change our lives for what? Are we better off now than before? Americans have worked together in the past and should do now as Americans without any other label attached. Stop the division and start uniting all Americans to build a country we can all be part of for our children.

Joan Fuhrman, Virginia Beach

Re All about power(Your Views, May 6): Besides demanding that the minority must switch its votes to support the majority, which is a pretty power-hungry move, its too late. Power-hungry lunatic Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already got that position locked up. First he blocked former President Barack Obama from his constitutional right to select a Supreme Court judge. It was too close to the election, and he wanted to make sure the next president got to make the choice.

Then when the vacancy came open at the end of President Donald Trumps term, he now had to rush through the nominee, not worrying about the people getting to choose to see who would be the next president. So, whos the power-hungry lunatic changing all the rules to suit his partys every need? Rather obvious isnt it Don Lovett?

Mike Schoen, Norfolk

See the article here:
Letters for May 20: Don't censor, use controversial books as a way to teach - The Virginian-Pilot