from the congress-made-companies-free-not-to-do-anything-to-encourage-censorship? dept
And nothing in Section 230 "induces" or "encourages" any behavior. What it says is that websites are free to moderate how they want, without fear of liability
As you know, last week Donald Trump sued Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in ridiculously dumb cases (which seemed to only really serve the purpose of continuing his culture grievance war and to be used as a fundraising hook). In each case, they claimed (incorrectly) that the private companies violated the 1st Amendment by kicking Trump and others off the platform and that Section 230 itself was somehow unconstitutional.
Two days later, it appears that someone on the legal team realized that when you file a lawsuit claiming that a federal law is unconstitutional, you have to file a notice of constitutional question, which effectively alerts the DOJ/Attorney General that someone, somewhere is challenging the constitutionality of the law.
Trump has now done so with identical such filings for YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The notice is as short and sweet as it is ridiculous:
1. Section 230(c)(1) and 230(c)(2) were deliberately enacted by Congress to induce, encourage, and promote social medial companies to accomplish an objective—the censorship of supposedly “objectionable” but constitutionally protected speech on the Internet—that Congress could not constitutionally accomplish itself.
2. Congress cannot lawfully induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Norwood v. Harrison, 413 US 455, 465 (1973).
3. Section 230(c)(2) is therefore unconstitutional on its face, and Section 230(c)(1) is likewise unconstitutional insofar as it has interpreted to immunize social media companies for actions, they take to censor constitutionally protected speech.
This argument has been made a few times, and it's incredibly dumb . . .
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