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Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, now conspicuous 2.4% stake owner in Elon Musk's Twitter just unveiled a new social media venture: BlueSky Social and the AT Protocol.
This is on paper what he's been telegraphing for a while as a decentralized base for social media that puts control of accounts and algorithmic curation back in the hands of the user using similar tech as pioneers like GNUSocial and Mastodon. But now with large enough potential backing to break the network effects that robbed us of an opportunity for interoperability in this space so far.
It's hard not to see this convenient turn of events as something of a plan. There was for a long time some rumor that Dorsey was something of a hostage during his tenure as CEO, an old school tech libertarian who helmed the notoriously censorious and partisan centralized platform (which was so in part on direct orders from the State as we now know) despite seemingly contradictory personal views.
This could just be opportunism and seizing the moment to promote what is now his pet project, but given what Elon Musk has insinuated about his vision for Twitter and the hypothetical X "everything app", and their common affection for web3 and decentralization, maybe this was more than just happenstance.
So what do you guys think, is this yet another decentralized social media flash in the pan, which will be forgotten like the countless others that also had some names backing them up (including Tim Berners Lee at one point) or is this actually part of a dastardly scheme that might form the base of the new twitter that will rise from the current turmoil?
The Intercept ran a pretty damning piece of investigation that goes into detail about DHS efforts against "disinformation", and includes among other things a web portal (that is still up btw) where government officials can just straight up demand things be taken down on those grounds, regular coordination meetings between feds and social media companies for the express purposes of such censorship and other fun stuff like that.
I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up with impeachment after the midterms actually given there are actual ties to the white house in there and this is the tip of the iceberg. But given we're talking about conduct as blatantly unconstitutional as the Snowden affair, it would also not be surprising if nothing comes of it.
As people here might recall, I believe very strongly that social media companies should be forbidden from removing any material that would be protected by the First Amendment from censorship or censor by the government. And, I am pretty close to a free speech absolutist in most respect. Yet, I do not see, from what is in the Intercept article, much support the claim of "blatantly unconstitutional" conduct. IF government officials intended to compel social media companies to remove material, that would be blatantly unconstitutional. If there was no such intent, but social media companies felt that they were being compelled, that might not be unconstitutional at all: "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State." Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 1004 (1982).
There doesn't seem to be much evidence in that article that any conduct has fallen on the "blatantly unconstitutional" side of the line. For example, you say that there is a web portal "where government officials can just straight up demand things be taken down," but that is not what the article says: "There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed." Now, again, maybe in reality those are not requests, but rather demands, but evidence for that conclusion is not in that supposedly damning article.
Not also that the article says that these efforts started during the Trump Administration, so I would not hold my breath re impeachment, absent evidence of very different behavior more recently.
In the final analysis, all of these companies have rules forbidding speech which is protected by the First Amendment. For govt officials to notify them that some post by User X violates those rules might be wrong, but it is awfully difficult to claim it is unconstitutional, let alone blatantly so. After all, if a user posts, "16 year old girl looking to get laid by adult" in a state where the age of consent is 16, that is protected speech which might well violate the terms of service; is it "blatantly unconstitutional" for a govt agency to notify the company of the existence of the post? Nor is it likely unconstitutional for the govt to help a social media company improve its methods of finding content that violates its terms of service; I assume that social media companies forbid gang-related speech (which, again, is protected by the First Amendment), but it would not be unconstitutional for the LAPD to inform FB that "slobs" is a derogatory term used by Crips to refer to Bloods.
So, again, although the actions set forth in that article might be immoral, poor policy, or 100 other things, we need a lot more specific evidence to conclude that it is unconstitutional at all, let alone blatantly unconstitutional.
Enough evidence to get them in legal trouble? Probably not. But there's a very dangerous aspect to the government knowing that they filed requests under the authority of the government and seeing the posts not come down. It's the kind of thing where the government can lean on a company and start asking some questions like "Why'd you refuse our request?" where both sides know that the government can make life hell for the company.
FB and Twitter are probably large enough that they could fight back, but it's not a good setup, imo.
Yes, I agree, and as I said social media companies IMHO should not be taking any of that stuff down (note, however, that the article states that only 35% of flagged posts were moderated). But there is a difference between1) the claim that what the government did was wrong; 2) what the government did was illegal; and 3) what the government did was blatantly illegal. The evidence for 2 and 3, given the current state of the law, is sorely lacking at this point.
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