All posts tagged: political speech

It’s Time to Give Up on Ending Social Media’s Misinformation Problem

It’s Time to Give Up on Ending Social Media’s Misinformation Problem

If you don’t trust social media, you should know you’re not alone. Most people surveyed around the world feel the same—in fact, they’ve been saying so for a decade. There is clearly a problem with misinformation and hazardous speech on platforms such as Facebook and X. And before the end of its term this year, the Supreme Court may redefine how that problem is treated. Over the past few weeks, the Court has heard arguments in three cases that deal with controlling political speech and misinformation online. In the first two, heard last month, lawmakers in Texas and Florida claim that platforms such as Facebook are selectively removing political content that its moderators deem harmful or otherwise against their terms of service; tech companies have argued that they have the right to curate what their users see. Meanwhile, some policy makers believe that content moderation hasn’t gone far enough, and that misinformation still flows too easily through social networks; whether (and how) government officials can directly communicate with tech platforms about removing such content is …

Hong Kong Is Self-Destructing – The Atlantic

Hong Kong Is Self-Destructing – The Atlantic

Hong Kong is about to enact another security law on top of the draconian one Beijing imposed following prodemocracy protests in 2020. Known as Article 23, the new law includes a vague definition of state secrets, just like that under mainland Chinese law; the power to hold suspects without charges; and punishments for people who publish “false or misleading statements.” The city’s mini constitution, which came into effect with its handover to China in 1997, actually requires the passage of Article 23. But no previous Hong Kong leader has been willing to take it on for fear of a ferocious backlash. In fact, the city’s government introduced a version of the article in 2003 but wound up shelving it under widespread criticism that the law violated Hong Kong’s special status. John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, will face no such dissension this time around. The 2020 national-security law, combined with British colonial regulations that the city has resuscitated to criminalize political speech, have obliterated civic space. The government has reengineered the electoral process to wipe …

Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children

Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children

Some court decisions are bad; others are abysmal. The bad ones merely misapply the law; abysmal decisions go a step further and elevate abstract principle over democratic will and basic morality. The latter’s flaw is less about legal error and more about “a judicial system gone wrong,” as the legal scholar Gerard Magliocca once put it. A case such as Hammer v. Dagenhart exemplifies the abysmal: The case, decided in 1918, struck down child-labor laws during an era of public outcry and concern about children working as long as 70 hours a week in dangerous jobs. Making it truly wretched was the Dagenhart court’s reliance on a dubious constitutional distinction to allow federal regulation of “evil” activities such as the lottery, prostitution, and the sale of alcohol but not of the employment of children. In our times, some of the leading candidates for the “abysmal” category are the extraordinarily out-of-touch decisions striking down laws protecting children from social-media harms. The exemplar is NetChoice v. Bonta, in which a U.S. district court in California struck down …

What Has Alcohol’s Existence Done to Humans?

What Has Alcohol’s Existence Done to Humans?

Plus: extremism on both the left and the right Tom Stoddart Archive / Getty November 9, 2023, 4:16 PM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Question of the Week Are humans better or worse off for having beer, wine, and spirits? Or, if you’d prefer introspection, how about you personally? Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email. Conversations of Note Markets and the Good The Hedgehog Review is running a thought-provoking symposium about our economic order: Critics of neoliberalism charge that its emphasis on markets over all else progressively gutted vigorous democracy, replacing it with the rule of technocrats … However valid that critique, certain features of neoliberal thinking were, arguably, contributing factors in the three decades—les trentes lorieuses, as the French called them—of widely shared prosperity that followed World War II. But with more fundamentalist neoliberals of the “Chicago school,” championing efficiency …

Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways

Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways

On October 13, The Onion shared on X (formerly Twitter) the headline for a new satirical article: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” The tweet was liked by nearly 100,000 people. Within a couple of hours, Michael Eisen, a genetics professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of eLife, an influential open-access journal for the life sciences, retweeted the post with the comment that The Onion “speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together.” As Eisen told me in a recent phone interview, he did this “on Friday the 13th—I should have known that was a bad idea.” At first, reactions to Eisen’s tweet were muted. On X, a scientist asked Eisen, who is Jewish and has relatives in Israel, whether he condemned Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack; in response to another post, Eisen wrote, “I condemn Hamas. I condemn the way Israel has treated Palestinians. I condemn the way one abhorrent act is used to justify another.” But then the …

Trump Discovers That Some Things Are Actually Illegal

Trump Discovers That Some Things Are Actually Illegal

Following each new indictment of Donald Trump, the former president and his allies have wasted no time in attacking the case. Their complaints have gravitated toward one idea in particular: the notion that prosecutors have charged Trump for engaging in the normal work of politics. The latest indictment, in Fulton County, Georgia, is “an example of this criminalization of politics,” commented Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who’d made a similar comment last month about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump on charges related to January 6. Jenna Ellis, who was charged alongside Trump in Fulton County, tweeted on Tuesday, “The Democrats and the Fulton County DA are criminalizing the practice of law”—a reference, presumably, to the indictment’s focus on her role as a member of Trump’s legal team working to overturn the 2020 presidential election. On Truth Social, Trump himself posted, “These monsters … are Criminalizing Political Speech, a total SHUTDOWN OF DEMOCRACY!” These claims of criminalizing politics are themselves nothing but spin. They imply that Trump and his associates took no action beyond typical political …

The First Amendment Is No Defense for Trump’s Alleged Crimes

The First Amendment Is No Defense for Trump’s Alleged Crimes

In the two weeks since Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the outlines of Trump’s trial strategy have taken shape. Trump has claimed that the indictment seeks to take away his “FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.” His lawyer, John Lauro, is frantically trying to position his client as a hero of “free speech and political advocacy,” arguing that Trump “had every right to advocate for his position” about the presidential election. Many high-profile Republicans and conservatives are also coalescing around the First Amendment as their main avenue of attack on the indictment. Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking member of the House GOP, has claimed that “President Trump had every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020,” and several prominent Senate Republicans have made similar statements. National Review, the conservative magazine, has accused Smith of trying to “criminalize protected political speech.” And the law professor and legal commentator Jonathan Turley predicts that the indictment will run into the “constitutional problem …

They Are Still With Him

They Are Still With Him

Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday, offers a detailed recounting of Trump’s effort to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power,” using as pretext claims of voter fraud that Trump knew were false—in the words of one of his advisers, “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” In addition to simply making unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, which is irresponsible but protected as free speech, Trump and his advisers hatched one bizarre plan after another to illegitimately seize power by overturning the election. If you’re trying to understand how, despite all of this, Trump could still be president again, you need look no further than the reactions of his primary rivals and …