social media – Page 63 – Hellbound and Down

TikTok and the Freedom of Speech

“Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…”
~ First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

During the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the famous Pentagon Papers case, a fascinating colloquy took place between Justice William O. Douglas and the lawyer for the government. The case was about whether the government could prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing secret documents that demonstrated that American generals had been misleading President Lyndon Johnson and he had been lying to the American public during the Vietnam War.

The documents had been stolen by Daniel Ellsberg, a civilian employee of the Department of Defense, in an act of great personal courage and constitutional fidelity, and then delivered to both newspapers. Two federal judges had enjoined the newspapers from publishing the documents, and the Supreme Court was hearing appeals by the newspapers.

When Justice Douglas asked the government lawyer if the phrase “no law” in the First Amendment literally means no law, he was unable to answer. The court found his mumbo jumbo reasoning so telling that it actually published the transcript of the Q and A in the court’s opinion itself – something it had not done before in modern times nor since.

The court ruled in that landmark case that freedom of speech and the right to know what the government is doing and the right to consult whatever source one chooses when forming an opinion each trump the government’s concerns for protection of state secrets. Thus, it matters not how the media obtains information; if it is material to the public interest, the media may publish it, without fear of civil or criminal liability.

The Pentagon Papers case was the high watermark for the freedom of speech: Freedom trumps safety. But the court studiously avoided answering Justice Douglas’ question about no law. If the Constitution means what it says, then no law literally means no law, and thus all sorts of legislation about speech – from defamation to treason to silencing TikTok – is unconstitutional. But if no law doesn’t really mean no law, then what does it mean?

Regrettably, today, no law means whatever the court says it means. That’s what happened last week when the court upheld congressional legislation silencing TikTok.

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EU Demands Access to X’s Internal Algorithms

According to the German press, the EU is demanding what the reports phrase as “authority access” to X’s internal documents regarding the platform’s changes to its recommendations algorithms, and programming interfaces.

The bloc is doing that as it investigates possible “hate speech” and “disinformation” violations relevant to the censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The probe is supposed to determine whether X should be treated as “a risk.”

X has been given four weeks to comply with the provisions of the law, long-criticized by free speech advocates but pushed by the EU as a means to “create a fair, safe and democratic online environment” for citizens, as European Commission Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen put it.

And what that democracy looks like becomes clearer when the real reason behind the latest case of pressure on X is revealed: Germany’s (still) ruling politicians, Chancellor Olaf Scholz included, suspect that Elon Musk’s support for the opposition AfD might translate to X boosting the party’s content.

Germany will elect a new parliament in just over a month and the chaotic campaign there has produced a number of controversial and repressive moves, especially against the AfD and its supporters, often branded as “extreme right-wingers” with some of the party’s branches declared to be “extremist” by Germany’s domestic spy agency.

And yet, the party leads Scholz’s Social Democrats in the polls, and is second only to the Christian Democratic Union, which is also currently in opposition, making it highly likely that the complaints against X’s alleged preferential treatment of AfD have more to do with pure politics and less with “hate speech” and “disinformation.”

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Celebrities and Tech Leaders Launch Campaign, Asking For Donations To Fund New Social Media Agenda

A coalition of celebrities and tech figures—including actors Mark Ruffalo and Alex Winter, author Cory Doctorow, musician Brian Eno, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, writer and podcaster Akilah Hughes, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — have launched the Free Our Feeds initiative and are asking for donations to fund their idea. Their mission is to reclaim and expand the AT Protocol, the decentralized framework Bluesky operates on, in an effort to wrestle control from billionaires and corporate interests.

But what do these celebrities have in mind? Free speech? Likely not.

Bluesky, originally conceived within Twitter as a censorship-resistant social media platform, has drifted far from its founding principles. Designed to offer users an open, decentralized space for free expression, Bluesky was intended to prevent centralized control over online discourse. However, it has increasingly been influenced by advocates for stricter content moderation, undermining its foundational goal of safeguarding free speech.

Despite these intentions, the Free Our Feeds campaign might raise some eyebrows. The group is asking for $30 million over three years—starting with $4 million through a GoFundMe campaign—to fund a public-interest foundation. While decentralization is a promising concept, past examples like Mastodon and even Bluesky reveal how these platforms can quickly fall under the sway of those who seek to control speech. Decentralized technologies have been used to censor content and sever connections between platforms that support free speech, raising doubts about how truly independent these systems can remain.

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Despite Sweeping Updates To Facebook Policies In Favor Of ‘Free Expression,’ Restrictions On Marijuana-Related Accounts Remain

Despite new changes to content moderation announced earlier this week, Meta—the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads—appears not to be changing its practices around marijuana, continuing to block search results on the social media platform for terms such as “marijuana” and “cannabis” and instead displaying a notice encouraging users to report “the sale of drugs.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of changes to content policies and moderation on Tuesday, such as stepping away from practices like third-party fact checking in favor of a community notes model, in which users are responsible for flagging questionable content. The company said it’s also “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse,” the company said as part of the announcement, “and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”

“Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been,” the company added.

To many in the cannabis space—including some medical marijuana patients, cannabis content creators, news outlets and even government agencies—that feels like an apt description of how they’ve have been treated by the company, which has historically removed or limited the visibility of marijuana-related accounts.

But the new changes—touted under the banner of “free expression”—don’t appear to affect the handling of cannabis on Meta’s platforms.

Neither Facebook nor Meta replied to Marijuana Moment’s request for clarifications on the new policies this week, but the only mention of drugs in the new announcement is the company’s stated intent to “continue to focus” its content moderation systems “on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, drugs, fraud and scams.”

“For less severe policy violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” it says.

It’s unclear exactly when all the changes will be deployed. Facebook said it would implement the use of community notes “over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year.” It didn’t provide a timeframe for changes to content moderation policies.

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