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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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The current contours, given existing statutory law for material support, were outlined in last year's case Twitter v. Taamneh. Worth a read. Of course, if you listened to oral arguments there, they did try to grapple with whether they could say something about 230 or about Constitutional limits, but the opinion they converged on dodged all of that and focused purely on statutory interpretation, making their job a lot easier and kicking the can down the road a bit. The upshot, at least for folks who want to impose some sort of legal liability on these companies is that, since this was purely about statutory interpretation, it's entirely possible that they could just pass a different statute that can provide a different standard. It will likely only be when more statutes are passed that pull that line closer and closer to Constitutional/230 limits that we'll really see where the boundaries are.

As an aside, in that case last year, these companies were all swearing up and down that their algorithms are totally passive, agnostic to the nature of the content, and that they are indifferent to the customers who use them. Compare to this week's arguments, where many of those same companies were all swearing up and down that they expend significant time, money, and effort to carefully curate a newspaper-like editorial product that reflects the company's desired expression, and that being able to prohibit Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow from using GMail just because they don't like their politics is just a regular part of their editorial discretion. This massive hypocrisy was pointed out multiple times, and we'll see if it matters in the final decision. There have been times before that the Court has been pissed off by repeat litigants who appear to make a mockery of the Court's standards and processes by making contradictory claims about the same underlying facts in different cases at different times to achieve the results they want.