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“It’s the First Amendment, stupid”

2024/10/31
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Decoder with Nilay Patel

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Adi Robertson
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专注于电动车和能源领域的播客主持人和内容创作者。
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主持人认为,特朗普及其支持者呼吁FCC撤销电视广播电台的执照,是对新闻机构的惩罚,违反了美国宪法第一修正案保障的言论自由。在正常情况下,富豪们呼吁惩罚新闻机构的行为只是空想,因为重新分配无线电频谱是一个漫长而复杂的过程,并且有强大的游说团体参与其中。惩罚新闻机构的行为违反了美国宪法第一修正案,该修正案保护言论自由,禁止政府制定言论规章或因言论惩罚个人。 Adi Robertson指出,特朗普经常威胁要撤销那些他认为对其不利或对民主党有利的电视台的广播执照,声称这是违反选举规则的行为。广播电台需要获得FCC颁发的执照才能使用有限的无线电频谱,并且必须承诺服务于公众利益。特朗普对媒体的惩罚性措施,部分原因在于电视广播电台拥有稀缺资源(频谱),政府可以利用这一点来进行惩罚。佛罗里达州法院驳回了州卫生部门对播放支持放松堕胎限制广告的电视台的指控,认为这违反了第一修正案。美国宪法第一修正案保护的言论自由范围远超人们的认知,仇恨言论和谎言都是合法的。美国宪法第一修正案简单来说就是国会不得制定任何关于言论自由和出版自由的法律,但该修正案在实践中受到一些限制。美国宪法第一修正案允许限制言论自由的情况非常有限,主要包括煽动暴力和真实威胁。试图利用政府权力来惩罚媒体机构的做法,特别是共和党,是不恰当的,这违背了FCC的既定流程和原则。FCC很少撤销电视台的执照,而且只有在经过漫长而严格的程序后才会发生。目前对媒体的威胁和惩罚措施缺乏正当程序和充分的调查,与以往FCC撤销电视台执照的案例形成鲜明对比。特朗普及其支持者对媒体的威胁并非空穴来风,一些与特朗普政府关系密切的人士认为这些威胁应该付诸实施。埃隆·马斯克认为电视台应该放弃其在现有监管体系下的特权,这在逻辑上是说不通的。马斯克及其支持者认为传统广播电视网是民主党的延伸,因此应该受到惩罚,这种说法与事实严重不符。共和党对广播平台言论监管的态度发生了180度转变,这与他们过去反对政府对广播平台进行任何限制的立场形成鲜明对比。公平主义原则源于广播,旨在确保广播电台报道重要公共问题时,要公平地报道所有方面。公平主义原则要求广播电台在报道公共问题时,要公平地对待所有观点,并为所有观点提供播出时间。最高法院在《红线广播》案中裁定,公平主义原则并不违反第一修正案。《红线广播》案的裁决认为,由于广播电台使用的是公共资源(无线电频谱),政府有权对其进行监管,以确保其服务于公众利益。里根政府废除了公平主义原则,这导致了保守派广播电台的兴起。公平主义原则的废除导致了保守派广播电台的兴起,如拉什·林博的节目。互联网与广播电台不同,它没有频谱稀缺性问题,因此政府对其监管的方式也不同。大型互联网平台是否也像广播电视网一样,拥有如此大的受众群体,以至于政府可以要求其服务于公众利益?与对大型互联网平台实施言论监管相比,拆分这些平台可能更能解决垄断问题,且限制性更小。特朗普将整个监管和司法系统视为打击敌人的武器,而不是一个公平公正的体系。第230条规定,互动式网络服务不应被视为其用户发布内容的出版商或发言人,但这项规定在实践中存在争议。如果取消第230条,互联网平台是否会对用户发布的内容承担更多责任,从而改善互联网环境?取消第230条可能会导致互联网平台做出糟糕的内容审核决策,要么过于宽松,要么过于严格,从而限制言论自由。

Deep Dive

Chapters
The episode begins by explaining what a broadcast license is and why politicians like Trump are threatening to revoke it, focusing on the recent case involving CBS and the 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
  • Broadcast licenses are granted by the FCC and are tied to local affiliate stations, not the networks themselves.
  • Trump has a history of calling for the revocation of licenses for news coverage he dislikes, viewing it as a form of election interference.

Shownotes Transcript

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IT really matters.

Hello, welcome to decoder. I mean, I I tell editor and chief of the virgin decoder is my show. But big ideas and other problems. We're just a few days away from one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes, and there's a lot going on. Early vote have been coming in for weeks now, and election day itself is just five days from the time this episode. First, publishers, I think we can all agree that there's a lot about this election that is deeply upsetting in some aspects that are Frankly shocking. But we've only got so much time on decoder each week.

So today.

I want to focus on something that has really stood out to me. Trump, in the group of tech billionaire around him that have all started talking about revoking broadcast licences for T, V. Networks like abc, N, B, C and cbs because they don't like the news coverage from those networks. Now trump has been making cats like this since twenty seventeen, in a way that trump is always for making croats.

But in recent weeks, elan musk, David sax and others have all picked up on IT talking about how we should take the wireless speakum back from TV networks and use IT for other things because they no longer believe the TV net ks are in the public interest in the Normal world. This would be a billionaire ish casting. One of the vector is doled out by the federal communications commission.

There is a long and boring process for reallocating IT. And companies like A T, N, T and rising have arms of lobbies who spend a lot of time and money getting what they want out of that process. And they're very good at IT.

On top of that, punishing news organza for the coverage by using the power of the government is one of those things that we have a first amendment to protect against. You know, the first amendment quite seriously, the first one, the one that protects free speech by prohibit in the government for making speech regulations or punishing people for what they say. You'd think elon mosque, so called free speech absolutist, would remember that one.

But IT turns out there is a long in complex history of the government regulating speech on broadcast platforms like radio and television. In that history dub tails into so many of the problems we have regulating tech companies and social platforms. There's only one person who can really help me explain.

All this is the virtuous senior tech in pollinator adi Robertson, who comes on the show to help me explain the most. Bx, and this one is really no exception. IT feels like bunch of a billion airs are just not doing the reading or paying attention to how anything works.

So I wanted added to help me create a framework to understand what's going on. You're going, hear, get into a lot of prime decoder territory. We talked about the fairness doctor in section to thirty monopoly.

And of course, the landmark supreme court case known is red line, which if we ever make a bingo card, will absolutely be a square. The episode is a wild rude. Here we go.

Edie Robertson, welcome to the color hi, let's just jump in with a couple of things that happened this month. The first is from october cbs air uh sixty minutes interview with vice president como Harris on its broadcast stations, then published in different versions of that interview online. This is probably mistake, wasn't the most transparent thing, but trump responded by calling the fcc to revoke cbs is broadcast license. What on earth is going on there?

So this is one of Donald trump's favorite threats, which is every time a station there is something that he thinks is too flattering to democrats or unflattering to him, he says that some kind of election interference or a campaign contribution that illegal and that IT means that the station is no longer Operating under its rules, and they should have its broadcast license revoked.

When me ask you a really dumb question, what on earth is a broadcast license in this context?

Broadcast stations, not cable T, V, but just to old fashioned over the air stations, there's only so much spectrum that they can take up. And so in order to keep that spectrum straight, the fcc asks stations to apply for a license. And because of its reality, they agree that this is supposed to be in the public interest.

They supposed to Operate in a way that is ultimately beneficial was they have that license, then they can air, uh, these licenses don't go to the actual networks themselves. They don't go to nbc, abc, they go to the local affiliate stations. And sometimes those stations are owned by the same parent companies in network, but they're not the same thing.

okay. So that basically sets up a situation where the local T, V stations in new worker meanie cems or whatever they have a license to. The veteran from the government in trump is basically saying he'll take those licenses away because he doesn't like what cbs news said.

I'm not entirely clear how wealth trump has thought this through because he has also made calls that suggests that CNN has a license, which is just not accurate CNN a cable network. But in theory, if somebody was going to interpret that, yeah, you would say already you're in a filling out of this network that I don't like of abc or nbc, alright, we will revoke your license because you are no longer Operating in the public interest over this.

In this case, one broadcast that we didn't like. And he's done this with cbs most recently, but previously abc. And then while he was president n bc.

these big networks, abc, cbs, N B, C, they used to have a distribution monopoly, right, the way that most people got video content or television was within tennis, they have the biggest reach. People remember when muc T V on nbc was actually like a cultural driver. That era has faded, right? People aren't watching the three big broadcast in networks every night all together as a family and living or anymore. Why is there so much emphasis on punishing them in this way?

I think that it's part of really an overall emphasis on just punishing the press for trump. Really, trump has argued against almost every possible kind of press outlet. But because TV stations are in this kind of unique position where they have a scarce resource, that means that there's a level of government oversight that's greater than just the first amendment. There's this added level you can push on.

right? So they have a license to the spectrum and that means the government can take the spectrum away and that's a mechanism to punish them. And you can do that to meta, right? You can like call mark zarca in front congress, but this is a matter .

and there are just obvious limitations that are on, say, broadcast T V that aren't on the internet. Like there's the seven dirty words you can't say on television. There's indecency restrictions. There's just I think of really a public understanding that TV doesn't work like the internet and that's .

because of the speakum, right, the public ones, the speakum. We lease IT to these companies and we say you need to use IT for our best interest. That's a very important idea.

But I I want to come back to you mean, to talk about the second extremely weird that happen. This month, the florida department of health sent legal threats to florida broadcast T, V stations. They were airing advertising from supporters of a measure that would ease abortion restrictions in that day. What happened there?

In that case, we are at least actually talking about TV stations, the T, V stations in florida that ran and advertisement, that is a woman describing how an abortion that we got for really awful health related reasons would be illegal under the new florida law.

And so the department sent letters to these stations saying, you have committed a sAnitary nuisance violation because the claim is that you're spreading false information, and that's going to make women not want to get health care as opposed to the incredibly restrictive abortion law, meaning that they would not get health care IT. Turns out. Just to add to this, IT wasn't even the health department idea that the letter was signed by the council, john Wilson, but he then resigned and said, this just came straight from to santis, and I was pressured to send this wow.

In that case, went to the courts, and the courts looked at IT and throw away IT basically, right?

They literally said, it's the first amendment, stupid.

And I think I might be useful to just talk about the first amendment for one second here. The first moment allows for way more speech than people realize or want to concede. The hate speeches is legal in united states.

Lies are legal in the united states. Even if you don't like them, the government can't make a rule slice. That is generally, I think, the foundation on which a lot of things are built. Can you just lay that foundation for fox?

So the first amended obviously, is very, very simple. Congress should make no law concerning freedom of the speech, freedom of press. And this ends up getting restricted in really specific ways.

There is some very, very specific cases where you can a bridge freedom of speech under the first amendment. There is very strict incitement of violence. There is true threats, which are not just someone saying, look, someone should kill this guy. There really direct communications. Beyond that, there's a lot of things people really wish were illegal because they are awful.

But it's very, very difficult to make those things illegal without then opening a huge can of worms in which the government can prosecute people for things that are just really hard to defend yourself against, or these can end up being applied in ways that just the people who worry about this really specific instance of harm are not expecting. You say, alright, I want to ban lies. One case that is pretty well known is lying about getting a congressional metal honor.

And then this goes to the courts. And the supreme courts says, well, the problem is just everyone lies. And if you ban lies, then not only are you assuming that the truth is always easy to tell, but you're also just criminalizing A A vast amount of speech.

The reason I want to lay the foundation is both parties in our country have wanted to regulate speech, the internet, which is something we're to come back to. And they've consistently run into the first amendment in ways that seem frustrating to them. They they talk about regulating speech and set aside all the first men, and problems are over over.

Get you ve written about this in the past. Link those pieces of people can read them. What i'm getting at is threatening licenses of broadcast T, V stations.

Or threatening broadcast stations is the way that you can regulate speech. There is a known mechanism for threatening broadcast T, V stations. And in the case of a sAnitary nuisance, they invented a mechanism to regulate speech.

So like, here's a law we think you're breaking that has nothing to do with the first amenity. That seems like the puzzle everyone's trying to solve. And just to be blunt, but the republican party in particular is more actively and aggressively trying to solve.

How can we regulate speech? Here are some levers we can pull to punish people for same things we don't like. Is that basically the shape of IT? Or are the democrats do not to?

If we're talking about speech in general, especially online speech, there's a lot of things that are doing that have some interesting speech implications. But I think that in terms of actual government officials trying to pull these levers that should not be pulled, IT tends to be republicans. And to be clear, these levers shouldn't be pulled like even though there are speech regulations on television stations, you are not supposed to be able to say, I disagree with a thing that they have aired. We should pull their license for IT and every fcc commissioner every time somebody calls for this, even if there were republican, even if they are A G pie under trump, they just doesn't not how this works.

let's not how supposed to work. But there have been instances where the fcc has pulled a TV stations license.

Yes, very, very rarely. There has been one case of its sticking. And IT took many years to do. Like we mentioned. The argument is stations have to Operate in the public interest.

And so in the one thousand nine hundred and fifties, in one thousand nine hundred and sixty, in Jackson, mississippi, there is this nbc, a filler called W L B. And IT was a very gently racist and process. Gregory and I would just cut out nbc programing that involved black people or that involved civil rights, that would just say, web si network service interrupted.

There were petitions filed by civil rights advocates that just said this station is not serving its need, that he is just not showing news. These were denied kind of over and over for procedural region reasons. And then eventually, years later, they ended up getting revoked, and someone else took over the station.

IT was very difficult. IT involved, extremely repeated, a greedy ous behaviors. IT was not just that they aren't something that somebody didn't like.

And then there are other cases. I mentioned that seven dirty words. George carlin said those on A T V. Station, and they had basically got a warning and ended up going to the supreme court and formally created this sort of indecency regulations that I mentioned. But even that, while they gonna note in their file, did not lead to the station losing its license.

I just want to highlight this to specifically for people. In the first sense that you're talking about, there's just a long legal and regulatory process. There's complaints from the public, there's evidence, there's lawsuits, litigation.

There's just an endless process that takes a long time and results in the government doing something you might not love IT. But the government, using its power, is usually checked by a long process of that kind and IT lead to the outcome. And in the second case, the supreme court litigation over a warning, the government just said, don't let George carlin's swear on T.

V. And they gave you a warning. And then there's a supreme court case that says, okay, you can sore in TV, but you just have to do IT after ten pm.

And that usually how we react to the government making speech regulations, even a warning triggers a whole bunch of litigation and worry about the first amendment and a new end up with yeah, in the public air ways just do this square words. Actually, the kids are in bed. So that's where we stand historically in just a minute will look at the present day. But first we need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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Walk back and talking with the verge, senior tech poetry itor ali Robertson, about threats politicians of Donald trump and decentish have made against media. It's during this election cycle for the break add was telling us about the one instance where a broadcast T. V station has ever had its license permanently.

Your vote. There was a long process that took many years and quite a lot of back and forth and appeals and so on. IT doesn't feel like we're doing that amount of processor worrying right now IT. IT feels like we we're just jumping to we should let politicians regular its speech.

We are. And again, I don't know that this is necessarily hugely thought through. A lot of IT is straight from Donald trumps brain to truth social. And then someone tries to frantically find a way to make that happen for him.

So do you think these are all just empty threats?

They should be empty threats. But we have people who are very close to the trump administration right before election saying, no, we actually, this should be real. This should happen. Investor and friend of elon must, David sax was treating this weekend that major broadcast networks are Operating on free licenses in exchange for requirements to serve the public interest. And it's an obsolete model.

So they should just have to compete with every other possible use of spectrum, and they would presumably lose because running a media outlet is not necessarily best selling path to Richard. And then elan musk, who has been something with trump, h, who has been promised a role in the administration, is all in on this idea. He's calling IT a free lunch. That station should no longer get under the current regulatory system. IT should not happen and should not make any sense, is something that could happen if you get a president in the White house who just has very little respect for the regulatory state and is willing to get IT, which is the precise thing that Donald trumpet .

ed'll do in office. Elon notary Operates starling, which obviously has spectrum licenses, Operate international service. What's funny, in the reason I keeps saying these guys haven't done any of the reading, is that all of lte, and to some extent five g, Operate on spectrum that was reallocated away from TV networks.

In the two thousands, the entire seven hundred mega hoods band of spectrum used to be for TV. And then we took IT, and we reallocated IT to the wireless Carriers, and they had a furiously auction for slices of that spectrum. And that's why we got four gt, and now they're using a lot of that factor for five g.

The process R T exists. IT is r been used for the exact kind of goals that these votes are talking about. And they can't see IT IT appears.

They just want to take this veterum by force. And their argument, elan's argument, is that the legacy broadcast networks are an extension of the democratic party so that they should be punished. And then obviously, he can go in an auction for the spectrum that seems just holy out of step.

Not was just the idea of the regulatory state, but with any process at all. Like if you take away the fcc and you take away this process, who would even run this auction? I think that is .

the big question of that. A lot of trump and project twenty twenty five, which is obviously not directly tied to trump, but is a very strong indicator of what the republican party wants. They want revenge on specific enemies they don't like.

And I think there is not actually a plan to build anything back up from that. I think they don't necessarily even care that much about running the auction even though obviously starlink properly could use vector. And is worth noting, IT really is about just killing media outlets.

That's the goal here. Everything else is kind of yeah, we're trying to make this make sense for them. I don't know that we've thought that far ahead.

The other faster ask of all this is the big ideological flip towards regulating speech on broadcast platforms that has taken place because not so long ago, IT was the republican party who was furious about the idea that the government would impose any restrictions on broadcast platforms like TV or radio, and they fought really hard to get rid of any restrictions that did exist.

If you're on the internet and you've ever talked about speed, you've heard of something called the fairness structure fcc used to impose that doesn't exist anymore. It's gone that people talk about all the time. And I can you explain me what the fair sectors.

the fairness doctor grew out of radio, which was a public trust the same way as television stations. And as the fcc, in its predecessor, reformed and they're organizing radio, they say, look, we need these stations to actually inform people. We cannot have them just be yellow journalism like those damn newspapers.

And so they went through this process of figuring out under what circumstances radio stations could editors realize. And the thing they ended up settling on and extended to television, which was also growing in one thousand and forty nine, was the fairness doctor, in which says these stations have to cover issues of public importance, and they have to cover all sides accurately. And that includes giving time to people from all sides of those issues in things like advertisements.

So one way that IT was used was for anti smoking activism. There were cigarette commercials, and the people who were arguing, now this gives you cancer, managed to get space on the air to revert the commercials. And courts said, no, that this is correct, that this is pro cigarette te time you need to get enter cigaret time IT didn't mean you have to devote the same amount of minutes to every issue. But I did mean that if you brought up an issue and you discuss one side, you had to represent that the other side existed and you had to give them air .

time to train forward a speed regulation. The government is directly telling broker networks what to put on their stations. And it's not even quantitative.

It's not fair amount of time which you can measure its quality ative. It's represent all the viewpoints on an issue fairly, which is just not the sort of speech the government should be regulating. Inevitably, that goes to court.

If you're decoder listener, you've heard me talk about this case a number of times. It's called red line broadcasting the fcc. The court issues the decision in one thousand nine hundred and sixty nine, added, what is the decision in that case?

The court rules unanimously that the first amount in the fairness doctor, they're not actually in conflict. And a lot of this is still based on these two fundamental issues of their scarcity. And this means the stations Operate in the public interest.

So IT says, like even now in the late one thousand nine hundred and sixties, it's not clear that were in a world where there are no scarcity concerns and there are still these public interests. And that means that we have an interest in encouraging also, not just less speech is not purely censorship, is more speech is part of their argument. And so they're saying that in this particular case.

there's not an issue. So because the public owns the airwaves and the government licenses the airwaves, it's allowed to say, this is how we want you to use the airwaves. These weak regulations are correct because actually they belong to us, right?

And they're just limited by the laws of physics. There are only so many stations there can ever be.

so that we come along until we get to the eighties and ramal reagan, who was a famously deregulatory president, and he gets rid. The fairness station is F.

C, C. Votes in one thousand and eighty seven to repeal the fairness doctrine. And congress had actually been trying to qualify IT into law, not just an fcc rule, but then reg vetos this the same year and congress can overwrite IT. Since then, there have been some sort of attempts to restore IT. There have been republican attempts to say we can never do that again, but it's largely accept that is just not coming back.

So at the government regulation of broadcast that works, that said, we own the veterum. You have to use IT in public interest. And we have said part of the public interest is a quality ative regulation that as you have to be, failure to present all sides of an issue, reagan, most famous republican president in modern history, gets rid of this regulation. And that does what? So we've been talking about TV.

But remember that this all started with radio. And radio is probably where we've seen the biggest impact, which is that suddenly A M stations don't have to represent all sides of the issue fairly. Instead, you get just this massive rise of rightwing radio. This is rush in both. This is this hugely influential market that suddenly can just grow up because the fairness doctor has gone.

And IT feels like even though people talk about reinstituted the fair struct all the time, the conservative talk radio is such a huge heart that ecosystem that is just that's fully off the table for republicans now right?

Even if you look at things that aren't A M radio, like obviously just A M radio as a force is not remotely what I was in the eighties. I think that if you try to apply IT to any number of republic and oriented stations, there's just no way that they would want to go back to world.

So how do you square? We're gonna have the government go after stations in florida that are running pro choice ads with we can never have a fairness doctor again.

I think that you just don't this is kind aware of just come down is that there is not a point in trying to make the logical argument for people whose argument is just we should be able to use the regulatory status of weapon.

So that's where we stand right now. Regulating broadcast isn't really politically viable in the same way I used to be. And when modern politicians talk about IT, it's usually in a web nice way that brings us to a pretty big question for the future lies in there a red line for the internet? We ll get into that after this brick.

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Welcome back. Right before the break, we were talking about the red line case, which had allowed the S, C, C to impose things like the fairness doctrine on broadcast speech in the past. But there is no red line for the internet. That means internet regulation as well kind of a mess. Why isn't the internet regulator activity radio?

The really obvious answer is that you don't have scarcity in the same way. There's a limited number of frequencies that you continue your dial to on radio. There is a virtually unlimited number of website that can ever exist, and IT is no harder to get to one of them in theory, and IT is to get to any other.

So you just don't have the same monopoly concerns that motivated. okay? There are only a few networks, and those networks have a fillies. If you think that you're not getting a fair shake from one site, you can go to another.

Let me make the comparison that I think a lot of people instinctively make in the broadcast era. You had abc and cbs and nbc who basically owned distribution of information. Then they had the public airwaves to do IT, and we said, okay, you got to users airwaves in the public interest here, some rules, and that's fine.

In the modern platform internet era, you still have just a handful of companies that address most of the people. Google, ma, tiktok. Can you make the same argument about them that they comment so much audience that we should be able to say use your platforms in public interest?

I think there's one potential response, which is just that even these platforms aren't limited by the number of hours in a day the way that a radio station is. You can still look at an almost infinite number of instagram profiles.

But the other argument is that we still are trying to figure out of these platforms are monopoly, that the just old sort of one thousand nine and eighties consumer harm standard of monopoly just has been a really awkward fit for modern web platforms. We're trying to see IT, okay, kind of free service that you can theoretic dick click away from at any time still be a monopoly. And we're getting cases that are bolstering that. There's the recent google search case, but it's definitely something that we've had to litigate our way towards.

Google lost that big search anti trust case in August. The company is obviously going to appeal in this case will going on for quite some time. And that's just one of the first of a whole batch of big tech antitrust cases that i've gotten to a ruling.

There are plenty of others that are so winning their way through cord. For example, we're waiting on the ruling in another google anti trust case, this one about the digital advertising market. The department of justice has filed a major antitrust lawsuit against apple, and there are plenty of other cases and investigations happening in both united states and in europe.

But what to say for the sake the argument that all these big platforms lose these cases in face the stepper penalties the government can offer up, they get broken up in two tones of little companies instead of being giant monopoly. Would that be Better for speech on the internet? Or is IT actually more effective to have big companies that we regulate directly?

One of the general ways that we decide whether we can limit the first amendment is if there is just not another good way to deal with IT, if there's just not a less restrictive way to deal with the problem. And I feel like there are many less restrictive ways to deal with the problem of there being some huge speech monopoly on the internet then implementing regulations that say, alright, it's a inevitable the facebook and tiktok monopoly. Let's just decide how they can cover things. So i'm not necessarily sure that even if they are in a police, the answer would be speech regulation to ensure me them rather than let's just break them.

That's the Normal, sensible way of looking at IT. But on the other hand, we have Donald trump who seems to think that the threat of antitrust enforcement is a way to blood in these companies into doing what he wants. Google has been very big.

They've been very responsible. And I have a feeling that google not going to be close to shut down because I don't think congress is gna take IT. That was trump, in his own words, to fox news.

Es maria barometer August. He has since repeated summer threats some more recently. So I do I listen to that and I think, okay, there's a very intellectual argument here that we can make that says we can solve the problem of regulating speech with the market.

We'll just have more companies and fewer man ops and people in amErica will pick the things they like. We'll pick the content moderation systems in the interview of the that they care for. And those customers are one in the market and the ones with the notes will fail, and that'll be fine.

And that seems like Donald trump is looking at that. And so I do what I wanna, i'll kill you, and I can't quite square. That is IT just, and I trust is now a weapon of of speech regulation for him.

I think that everything is a weapon. I think this is fundamentally the issue is that trump, seize the entire regulatory and judicial system as things that you should weapon SE against your enemies and let's skate against your friends. He just doesn't fundamentally believe that laws and regulations are systems.

He just believes that the things that you use as necessary, yeah, you don't like google and google is a monopoly, so you attack google. But okay, well, facebook, facebook of monopoly probably vent mark sucker berg is suddenly trust friends, so you aren't going to do anything. The problem is that trump wants to regulate companies that probably should be regulated.

So google does have its monopoly. The problem is that then if you are a company that is friendly to trump and you are monopoly, trump is not going to apply that same standard to you. So it's a system that is just so selective that even if there is a stop clock being right twice a day, it's fundamentally not being used as a system is not the rule of law.

I would point out that this is the exact argument for the government should make these regulations because there's no way to be right all the time when people talk about regulating speech on the internet. The thing that always comes up the section to thirty, which I hope if your a decoder with something you've to talk about many times before and IT falls to you to try to quickly explain what session .

to third section to thirty, says that no interactive web services like an APP or website should be taken as the publisher or speaker for something that the third party user put on that site. There are a bunch of education to that IT applies to a bunch of other things. But fundamentally, it's that if I posted something on facebook and that thing is illegal, you can't see facebook for what I posted.

The goal of two thirty was to get platforms to moderate IT was to shield them from liability for making decisions. IT has played out very differently, right? People to take two thirty away because they think the platform is aren't moderating enough.

is somehow two thirty makes people angry either when platforms moderate too much or when they don't moderate enough. The argument when they don't moderate enough is, well, they enough to care because of two thirty when they moderate too much as well. If two thirty didn't exist, they would have to just allow anything.

Just for the second argument, you think we would have a Better internet if platform ers or more responsible for the content their users were posting?

I think that there are certainly cases where people have made good arguments, that there are sites just Operating in bad faith, that there are like non consensual pornography sites that are very clearly aware of what's happening. But I think in terms of just really big sites, I think what you would get is a bunch of really terrible moderation decisions. I think you would probably get either something that's successful or you would get something that's just hyper santis ed in a way that blocks a lot of speech people like and find valuable.

It's interesting and is playing out right now with the absolute ack of moderation is happening on elan musk in the incredibly hyper aggressive moderation attacking on threats. No, it's happy. IT seems like in a world where there is competition, user would move back and forth or they would both arrive at the same sort of ideal. But instead, they're headed in different directions and they're both kind of miserable.

At least we can still go to blue arms.

don, that's true. There's a little bit more competition than there was before. Competition gets you part of the way there, but not all the way.

We've talked about this a lot on decoder. I even asked former president brock obama about red line and regulation directly when he was on the show last year. His take was that we need to find another legal hook for the internet era.

The idea that the public in the government, on the airwaves, that was really just another way of saying this affects everybody. And so we should all have to say in how this Operates. And we believe in capitalism, and we don't mind you make IT a bunch of money through the innovation and the products that you're creating in the content that you're put out there.

But we want to have some saying what our kids are watching or how things are being advertised, but the principal still applies, which is how do we create A, A, A deliberate process where the average citizen can hear a bunch of different viewpoints and then say, you know what? Here's, here's what I agree with. Here's what I don't agree with. And hopefully through that process, we get Better outcomes.

So IT feels like the stakes to the selection or a potential hair administration searching for that other hook to pass some kind of regulations on tech platforms and deal with A I, which creates all kinds of new weird speech problems that we will have to talk about, another epsom, or a trump administration, which allows an empower ty on us to go seize transmitters out of T. V. Stations in florida. IT doesn't seem like there's actually a middle ground here.

I think either administration than we get after the election is going to pass speech related rules in some form, the appetite for child safety regulation and limitations and section two thirty or just there are two great in both parties. But I think that the thing we're going to get with a Harris administration is rules that we can argue about and disagree with. And the thing we're going to get in the trumpet administration is whatever trumpet thinks is going to pish, the people he doesn't like.

Those are the stakes in this election we've already voted. Thank you. And if you have in, please take a second and make a plan to go participate in our democracy.

It's important. I'd like to thank any Roberts in for joining me on the show. If you've thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of, you can email us a decoder vercoe.

We really do read ils. You can also me up directly on threats and at ret, have a tiktok check IT out. It's at decoder pot. It's a lot of fun like decoder. Please share with your friends and subscribe over podcast. Really like the show he is with a fast start view decodes the production, the version part of the boxing podcast network or producers of cake cox and next time edis. The James court music is very.

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