12 July 2021

The New McCarthyism and The GOP Approach To Clog The Internet With A Cesspool of Garbage

Let's take a deep breath and clear the air for one more time
from the sad-state-of-affairs dept
Mon, Jul 12th 2021 6:06am — Mike Masnick
"The Republican Party that once claimed to be the party of keeping government out of business and that actions have consequences has moved far, far beyond that. These days, it's a parody of everything it once derided. Take a look at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's newly announced Framework to Stop the Bias and Check Big Tech. Even from the naming you can see quite clearly ridiculous victim-playing. There remains no evidence of any "anti-conservative bias" in social media content moderation. It is true that some Republican supporters have faced moderation... for breaking the rules. Just as some non-Republicans have faced moderation for those same reasons. It's just that these Republicans -- with no other fundamental principles to go on -- have tried to turn basic content moderation for policy breaking into a whiny victimhood. . .
Remember when Republicans used to mock Democrats for always playing the victim and being "whiny snowflakes"? Apparently it was all projection.

Just days before the 2018 primary election, Google search results for “California Republicans” identified our ideology as “Nazism.” At the same time, conservatives like Devin Nunes and Donald Trump Jr. were shadow banned on Twitter. For pro-life groups like Live Action and others, the discrimination wasn’t subtle at all. Since then, the examples of conservative censorship and bias across internet platforms has proliferated. Each one of you are all too familiar with how Big Tech and its overwhelmingly liberal executives want to set the agenda and silence conservatives.

Of course, each of those has a story behind them and none of them are presented accurately. Note that McCarthy doesn't bother to explore why any of the above happened (if they happened -- Twitter doesn't engage in "shadow banning" so that's just misleading claptrap). No one at social media companies wants to "silence conservatives." Again, most of the evidence suggests the exact opposite. But the fact is that if you violate policies -- including by spreading dangerous disinformation about, say, health or elections -- you might get kicked off.

That should be a policy that actual "conservatives" support. . .Just to make this clear, looking at the accounts that get the most link clicking on Facebook, they are almost always dominated by famous "conservative" individuals and organizations.

Again, the evidence does not suggest "anti-conservative bias." If it's true (and even this could be disputed) that conservatives violate the policies of social media services more often -- for example, by posting utterly debunked conspiracy theories about elections, healthcare, and more -- well, perhaps that's on them. Not the companies.

Then we get to the actual policy recommendations:

Accountability: Our framework would rein in Big Tech and end their abusive practices, including by changing the law so that Americans can challenge Big Tech directly for their infringement of public speech rights. This effort starts by taking away the liability shield Big Tech has hidden behind for far too long. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would be changed to limit liability protections for moderation of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment and would preclude Big Tech from discriminating against Americans based on their political affiliation. We would also require regular reauthorization of Section 230 so Congress may update regulations of the constantly-evolving internet landscape.

Sigh. This is such garbage. Moderation is not an infringement of your right to speech. . . Similarly: "preclude Big Tech from discriminating against Americans based on their political affiliation." First of all, no one is being banned for being a Republican today. The only cases I've ever seen of someone being banned for political affiliation were Nazis. So the Republican Party is now making it official party platform that websites must protect Nazi speech? Really?

Transparency: Our framework would empower Americans by ending Big Tech’s ability to hide behind vague terms of service that have not constrained their conduct in any meaningful way. We will do so by mandating that any Big Tech content moderation decisions or censorship must be listed, with specificity, on a publicly available website. In addition, by requiring Big Tech to implement and maintain a reasonable user-friendly appeals process, our plan will empower conservatives and others whose speech rights have been infringed to challenge Big Tech’s attacks.

Anyone who knows anything about content moderation knows what this really means: give us the rules so we can figure out how to argue with you that we didn't break them. This is the abusers/harassers free pass to be a total asshole to the staff of social media companies, insisting that when they're harassing someone it wasn't "really" harassment. Or when they post racist garbage "it was just a joke." This is to open the floodgates on being able to continue to annoy and harass social media to try to make sure all garbage content must remain up. . ."

More > Use the underlined provided at the start of this post

The whole thing is one giant performative, grievance, pity party from the party that used to pretend to be against such things. It's just sad, but that is the state of the Republican party these days.

Filed Under: antitrust, bias, big tech, kevin mccarthy, republicans, section 230

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