#Google SCOTUS case

[elfwreck]

Do you think ao3 is going to have a problem in the future?

hot damn isn't that an open-ended question.

...er. yes. Yes, I think AO3 will have "a problem" at some point in "the future."

Which problem is up for debate.

I don't think AO3 is going to be taken down or even substantially hurt by lawsuits from media companies or authors who hate fanfic. I think the time for that was over 10 years ago; if Disney hated fanfic and thought it was illegal, they would've gone after AO3 before it was internationally famous with more than 5 million users. Before it had won a Hugo Award.

Doesn't mean I think a lawsuit isn't possible, and the current SCOTUS in the US is run by a pack of corporate shills, but... it's a hard stretch to get a copyright-creativity case to go that far, and even with such a court, the outcome wouldn't be guaranteed. And no media company wants to be the test case for a lawsuit that decides "actually yknow what? Fanfic is pretty much legal."

I think there will be more regions that block AO3, in one way or another. Not many places have China's control over the internet, but there are other blocks, like pestering Google and demanding they filter search results.

I think antis are going to continue to scream about AO3 allowing content they don't like, even if the term "anti' changes and they wind up calling themselves something else. I think this may create some kinds of problems, including with payment processors, depending on where and how they yell. I don't think any of that will shut down AO3 or change its policies.

The thing to keep in mind is: AO3 does not need to grow. AO3 is not a venture-capital company. It does not have ROR. It does not generate profits. It is not accountable to anyone but itself for its policies and activities. It was designed by a small pack of fans who decided "we're damn tired of being pushed off our fic archive websites, and even more tired of VC-backed things showing up and trying to fleece us for profits while simultaneously insisting to their mainstream stockholders that they don't approve of smut, that they dislike slash, that they think fanfic is copyright infringement. We need to own the servers and set our own policies."

AO3's going to face plenty of problems in the future. A lot of people do not like smut, or do not like some kinds of smut, and think it should be illegal. Or they think it should be restricted. Or at the very least, the people who host it, write it, and read it, should be ashamed, and if they're not, they need to be Taught A Lesson.

Repeat with: slash fanfic, RPF, fanworks based on children's shows, and fanfic in general.

A lot of people think AO3 is Doing Fandom Wrong, and some of those people are going to cause problems. Some of those people are probably government officials, so the problems are going to be big.

But I don't think any of them are going to succeed in shutting down AO3 (although accessing it may get more difficult from some parts of the world), and they're definitely not going to change the core policies.

AO3 was started by people who'd been watching the legal and cultural landscape around fanfic for decades. It's run today by people with the same kinds of experience, the same kinds of beliefs about fandom culture.

I am not worried about the future of AO3.

#ao3

[centrally-unplanned]

I saw this slightly-old post making the rounds recently by former alt-right memelord Walt Bismark, on how the alt-right "won" in the late 2010's - positing that as the cause of why it generally vanished. I agree overall with the vanishing part, its not gone-gone ofc but it waned as a cohesive movement. But I saw a lot of people (and generally not alt-right figures) agreeing with its conclusion and I am a bit more skeptical of those.

Its largely a personal essay so I wont address most of it, but it has a summary of five main points that outline essentially "the agenda of the Alt Right at the beginning" to evaluate success upon. Bismark thinks they won on all five, but overall I think this is playing a trick of inventing an enemy to claim you defeated. Anyway, the points:

1: Shift the “Overton Window” of acceptable public discourse to make it politically viable to openly discuss the interests of white people in mainstream politics, in the same way black people or Jewish people discuss their collective interests. 

This one I will grant a partial victory - there was a legitimate intensification of "white as identity" in politics, a making explicit what was implicit in the 2010's. Now ofc I consider this to be a classic horseshoe moment; the hard left at the time was also extremely interested in abandoning race neutrality and valorizing racial identity as an organizing principle, and did it in a very ham-fisted way that the right capitalized on, so it was an easy battle to win - but that is what it is, ofc the wider environment defined the goals & strategy. I mention it however because I do think this is only partial, and the gap between implicit and explicit isn't that relevant. He mentions as an example of this success:

Affirmative action was of course squashed by SCOTUS and the necessary legal infrastructure is being deployed to burn it down. Mainstream conservatives are mobilizing a lot of resources and energy to this end.

But conservatives have been fighting affirmative action for 20+ years, easily. Here is a 1999 article on precisely such a campaign, I literally just googled "conservatives affirmative action [year]" and I get results each time, 2003 had big cases (the Bollinger cases) on AA, etc. I remember "affirmative action bake sale" memes from like 2006 at my uni! What changed between Bollinger and 2023's Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is that conservatives had just had enough time to stack courts, and wait for Supreme Court justices to die. That just...takes time to do! The strategy hadn't changed between 2003 and 2023. And meanwhile, did they win? They won that court case, sure. What do you...think the ethic makeup of the next Harvard class is gonna be? Wanna take some bets?

His other listed victories are things like:

"Vivek defended the Great Replacement Theory on national television and remained a major Trump surrogate. The SPLC would have marginalized him for that 10 years ago. Today because of polarization and MAGA closing ranks they can’t do shit."

And like, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have successfully marginalized a Republican politician in idk 2003 are you completely high right now? Strom Fucking Thurmond was an active Senator in 2003! This is the repeated tactic here, the imagined enemies - there was never a time where liberal institutions could consistently force conservative politicians to kowtow, so you can't claim it as a change.

This is why I mention the social justice horseshoe, because he has this point here:

These days you can complain about quotas etc. being unfair to you as a white man and it’s not inflammatory or low status among centrists and conservatives. Even non-woke liberals won’t really hate you for it, just quietly think you’re a bit of a chud. This was not the case in 2015. 

And this is partially correct, I agree there was some norm shift. But that is because in ~2010 there really weren't any quotas against white men, it wasn't a thing almost anywhere outside of university applications, so the complaint would make no sense. What happened was that starting in ~2012 a huge left cultural movement started that just openly supported active discrimination against whites, Asians and men. They were a small minority of course, and never had much power, but they got enough power in certain institutions like non-profits and universities that there was a string of just very obvious cases of clear racial discrimination against in particular whites & asians (both men and women, white women often got it very bad in this wave). And the large majority of people just saw that and went "uh yeah racism is still bad?" and so now you can say that because its actually relevant to say. From that lens, is this a successful cultural victory on the part of the alt-right? In some sense sure, but really its more a cultural failure of the hard left. The status quo just kept on chugging along.

Ugh that point went long, the others repeat so we will go through them quicker.

2: Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics. 

A fake enemy here - anti-immigration was already a huge issue for Republicans in the 2000's. It had a huge wave under Obama actually, it goes in cycles like that. And it responds to material conditions; it's a big issue again right now because the immigration numbers spiked massively under Biden, its just way worse of a problem now (primarily due to the booming economy of course). Again a partial victory for the first part, I agree its more salient due to Trump platforming it, but I'm skeptical that it is a big shift - people are memory-holing the Tea Party movement really badly here for example.

And the second point is just obviously false, Republicans always cared about that, and they care about it less now, giving up the ghost on gay marriage for example. The Alt-Right coincided with a decline of the influence of the Religious Right, and it shows on this issue, 0 points.

3: Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action. 

Peak "log off" moment, it was always acceptable to discuss this outside of liberal/professional circles and there it still isn't acceptable to discuss it. Charles Murray wrote the Bell Curve in 1994 and his been an American Enterprise Institute Scholar for this entire span of time. This is confusing churn for change - the mid-2010's had a bunch of big, mainly online fights about HBD, and then everyone just sort of moved on with the status quo pretty much unchanged. Nothing like education policy, even in Republican circles, has shifted over this.

4: Convince conservatives to stop ceding moral authority to liberals and allowing them to determine who on the Right is verboten or beyond the pale. Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right” or purge people for wrongthink. 

Sigh, again when have Republicans ever ceded moral authority to liberals? Harvard University could not condemn Newt Gingrich in ~2009 and make him change his mind about anything. And "Republicans don't self-criticize while Liberals eat themselves alive" has been a complaint for literally decades, you would hear that as far back as say Clinton and things like the 1999 WTO protests. Its both true and exaggerated - the Tea Party primaried Republican candidates for wrongthink in 2010, and Trump did the same thing! With disastrous results for the Republicans in 2022. I really, really don't think you can look at Trump's Republican party and say they solved the Wrongthink problem.

5: Expose and dismantle the hypocritical attitude that allows neocons to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically.

This one is just a lolwut moment, "brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically", like what does that even mean? Name the concrete policy proposals George Bush implemented in 2007 than Donald Trump didn't in 2018 around this topic. Again a fake enemy, they were never repressed by the right, and ofc are still hated by liberal institutions like universities.

Moving on from any specific point, I think its very telling that very little about free trade vs protectionism or isolationism/support of autocracy abroad enters this list. Because beyond immigration those are the big shifts the Trump movement (which is the mechanism the alt-right has to claim for making its impact) has ushered into the party. They didn't change its stance on sexual politics or "race & IQ" or anything, those haven't changed, but meanwhile the party has completely flipped on things like tariffs or opposition to Russian military expansion. But of course those don't align neatly at all with the issues the Alt-Right fought about in 2015.

The reality the Alt-Right can't escape is that they used Trump as their mechanism for change, and Trump never really cared about any of their goals beyond immigration. He used them and then pursued either bog-standard Republican policy or his own mercurial, autocratic whims, eventually channeling all of this energy into election denialism. I really don't think if you pulled aside frikkin Ryan Faulk in 2014, asked him to put down his graphs about Raven's Progressive Matrices of black Caribbean students, and said "Hey 10 years from now all of this energy is being channeled into pretending that a failed real estate mogul didn't lose the 2020 presidential election", that he would look at that outcome and think Mission Accomplished.

I don't want to fully oversell, there are for example wins Bismark doesn't mention (School choice comes to mind, the biggest conservative win of the past decade besides the protectionist swing). The Alt Right was an influential movement, it earned its place in history. But I do not think it is an example of being a "victim of its own success". I think instead it should be understood as part of the "radical froth" of the 2010's, that bubbled over and then evaporated like its more intense leftwing peers did. It made some mark and then got left in the dust.

Net ranking of the 5 points: 0.5 for Point 1, 0.25 for Point 2, 0 for the rest, 1.25/5.

#Sociological History of the 2010's #Alt-right discourse

[borderlineborderline]

TW: violence against children, violence against women, USA police and government and courts tempting despair with their lack of concern for people

So I’ve been taking this Law and Ethics course and holy shit I thought I could never be more appalled by the American government and judicial system, yet here I am. Gonna start sharing little “fun” tidbits of what I’ve learned just so I don’t have to bear the mental burden of knowing this insane shit all on my own, and with the hope that somebody somewhere finds it useful.

First, did anybody here know that the Supreme Court, back in 1983, literally ruled that restraining orders are just meaningless pieces of paper? I mean, maybe you knew that in practice already, but did you know it’s actually established LAW that they don’t matter?

In 1983, the SCOTUS oversaw Castle Rock v Gonzales, an absolutely horrific case wherein a woman had a restraining order in place against her abusive husband, but when he came to kidnap their children and she called the police, they actively chose to do nothing. When he murdered their children, she sued the police force for refusing to act. The SCOTUS responded to this by saying that the police did no wrong, as a restraining order doesn’t *require* action, apparently, it just *allows* for action if the police ~choose~ to act. The police have “discretion,” said the court, not to enforce a restraining order, even if the order itself specifically declares that it must be enforced. Lovely.

Anyway, that’s deeply upsetting. Wish I knew how to fix it, but unfortunately I don’t. Hoping to inspire someone smarter and more capable than I to… I don’t know. Think of something? At least hoping to leave people informed.

Source: Ch 3 and Ch 4 of Public Health Law and Ethics by Gostin. Also probably easy to find info about this case online anywhere if you Google the case name.

#USA #us politics #us police #scotus #us law #tw violence #tw violence against women #tw violence against children #education #information #depressing shit

[187days]

Day Twenty-Six

"Miss M keeps it real!" -one of my ninth graders

I don't know exactly what said ninth grader was referencing at the time- I heard the comment in passing as I was walking up and down the aisles- but I am pretty straightforward with my students about what I'm teaching, my expectations, all that. Plus, I have a tendency to speak pretty frankly. So, yeah, I guess I keep it real.

I'm taking it as a compliment.

The reason I was walking up and down the aisles was to check on students' progress on their Culture Projects. They're in the middle of drafting, and I think it's going really well. I've even had some minor breakthroughs with students who've struggled with research-based assignments, so that's awesome. And, since students were using their time well, and I didn't have to redirect them often, I was also able to actually sit and proofread some finished drafts as they day went on.

In APGOV, I taught a lesson about federalism, which might sound like it wasn't very interesting, but it totally was. First, I lectured on how and why the balance of power between the national and state governments evolved over time, calling on them to explain some of the SCOTUS cases that had contributed to that evolution (research they were assigned to do last class), among other things. I fielded questions, too (about the growth of the bureaucracy, implied powers, why the shift towards cooperative federalism became more pronounced after WWII...) Then they read an article about the basics of fiscal federalism, and I gave them an example to refer to: our district's use of ESSER grant funds. That's public information, and it's relevant to them, so that actually generated quite a bit of conversation.

After the bell, I quickly prepped a few things for tomorrow, then headed to a Leadership Team meeting. That's when I learned, from the admins in attendance, that it was a fairly dramatic day in the building, a handful of Incidents they had to deal with. That's one byproduct of the staff shortage. The growing frustration with the amount of cleaning we all have to pitch in and do is another. That dominated the conversation, initially, but then we did what we'd actually gathered to do: set the agenda for the next faculty meeting.

Mrs. T and I walked out together afterwards, chatting about our recent experiences. It's strange that they're so different now, but I'm glad that her new role isn't affecting our friendship. I admit that I did worry about that a little.

At home, I turned my cell phone back on to a flurry of texts from my politically-inclined friends about the Speaker of the House, which was followed up by a Google chat from one of my GOV students, telling me she'd yelled for her dad to turn on the news when she heard about it, and she's becoming a politics nerd. I said that was excellent, and we'd be discussing it tomorrow.

Rewriting lesson plans to seize the teachable moment? Heck yes.

#teaching #edublr #teachblr #education #teacher #high school #social studies #conversations about current events #cue the music of triumph #the principal #Mrs. T #Dean 2 #leadership team #day twenty six

[demontruth]

It's very important everyone in the US paid attention to these cases SCOTUS hearing testimony on right now. It about Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Which was about giving the government the right to set regulations by regulatory agencies within the government that understand more about the difference fields. Like CDC, EPA, FAA, OSHA, FTC, FDA, FDIC, etc. Just think of any regulator body in US. Now thanks to case of Chevron back in 1984 we have regulations that for the most part keep us safe. What SCOTUS wants to do now or the conservative justices on the court want to do is overturned it like they did with Roe v Wade. That would mean all those safe guards and agencies would no longer have the power they did. Just stop think about that for a moment. Our money in banks wouldn't be protected, the food on our tables would no longer be inspected, if there was another pandemic CDC couldn't issue regulations.

The reason behind SCOTUS, conservative politicians and Republicans wanting it overturned isn't that there's anything wrong with it. No it's all to do with money and power!! If they overturned its more money in their pockets and them allowing the companies and corporations to regulate themselves. It's all true. Just Google SCOTUS Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Please call your Congress person and Senator demand they pressure SCOTUS not to overturn Chevron!! It's horrible enough SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade don't allow the overly conservative justices to do this to us also!!

#SCOTUS #supreme court #Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council #overturning Chevron #extremely important #us politics #us government #us supreme court #could change the US in ways we can't even imagine #signal booster #this matter to every US voter

[bobnitido]

Stanford’s Daphne Keller on SCOTUS Decision that Google, Twitter, and Facebook not Responsible for Islamic State Deadly Posts

On May 18, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 ruling in Twitter v. Taamneh and a companion case, Gonzalez v. Google, rejecting efforts to hold Twitter, Google and Facebook culpable for a deadly Islamic State attack discussed on those platforms. Here, Daphne Keller, a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School and director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, discusses the decisions.

What are the key takeaways of the decisions? How important are they?

They are important rulings, and it is also important how sober and straightforward they are. We are seeing so much political theater in Congress right now on the topic of platforms and online speech. These rulings make the Supreme Court look like the grownups in the room.

Both of these cases arose from tragic facts. Plaintiffs lost family members in ISIS attacks in Europe. Their theory was that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube should be liable because of ISIS’s general presence on the platforms — even though the platforms seemingly took down any ISIS content they found, and the attackers had not used the platforms in planning or executing the attacks. Numerous lower courts have rejected very similar claims, saying both that platforms were immunized under the law known as Section 230 and also that, even without that immunity, plaintiffs’ claims under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) would fail. Late in the Taamneh and Gonzalez cases, the plaintiffs added a theory that the ranking algorithms that platforms use to order newsfeeds or recommend videos were themselves a source of liability, and not immunized by Section 230. Only a few lower court cases have spoken to this but they all — including 2nd and 9th Circuit rulings — rejected this theory as well. Given those consistent lower court rulings, many people were surprised when the Court took these cases.

In this week’s unanimous Taamneh ruling, the Court resoundingly rejected plaintiffs’ ATA claims as inconsistent with basic tort principles. It said that offering a generally available Internet service, including one that ranks content and targets it to particular users based on their apparent interests, does not rise to the level of “aiding and abetting” acts of terrorism. Liability on such attenuated facts would be too far-reaching, and at odds with longstanding common law. As the Court noted, it would effectively make Twitter liable for every act of terrorism by ISIS. Because the defendant platforms faced no liability on the merits of the ATA claims, the Court declined to resolve the question in Gonzalez about Section 230 immunities.

Daphne Keller, lecturer in law at Stanford Law School and director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center

In a way this is an “everybody, calm down” moment. The court strongly affirmed that basic tort principles apply and protect platforms, just like they protect other communications services. Numerous amicus briefs exhorted the court to reinterpret Section 230 and upset a generation of Internet law, but the Justices did not rise to the bait. (I was one of many people who feared the worst, as I told the New Yorker in this Q and A. I think that outpouring of alarm, including in the very large number of amicus briefs the Court received from voices across the political spectrum, helped them realize the importance of caution.)  A case may come that actually does probe the limits of Section 230 protection — limits that are very real, though also relatively well fleshed out by lower courts. But this was not that case. Hopefully the experience of Gonzalez and Taamneh will put the Court in a better position to think and rule carefully when that case does come.

Justice Clarence Thomas said Twitter and other social-media websites didn’t provide the sort of “knowing and substantial assistance to ISIS” necessary to find them culpable under the Anti-Terrorism Act. How much would you read into the decision regarding the Court’s support for Section 230,  the foundational internet law that shields social-media platforms from liability for user-generated content?

The Court expressly declined to touch the Section 230 issues, but I do think the way it characterized platforms in Taamneh is relevant for the claim, made in Gonzalez, that platforms should lose immunity based on their ranking algorithms. The Taamneh ruling treats algorithmic ranking as a basic part of platforms’ function, and not something that — for tort law purposes — gives them a closer relationship with particular posts or more legal responsibility for what users say online.

That seems pretty consistent with the argument, which the ACLU and I made in our amicus brief, that ranking and ordering content is one of the basic platform functions immunized under Section 230. (These points are also made authoritatively in a brief from Section 230’s authors, Ron Wyden and Chris Cox.) The statute explicitly says that the immunity covers platforms that “organize” content. Any other reading would effectively gut the statute and take away protections for any platform that has ranked newsfeeds (like Twitter or Facebook), recommendations (like YouTube or Etsy), or even search results. That would leave them with bad options: either give up on ranking and ordering the oceans of content they host, or else offer ranked features that have been reduced to the most anodyne and risk-free materials. Neither of those things would be good for Internet users’ ability to speak and access information online.

This is an American ruling. Are there similar cases in the EU that we should be watching, where the outcomes might be different?

European courts actually resolved some of the key issues in these cases years ago, in ways that seem broadly sensible to me. The EU doesn’t have Section 230, but it does have longstanding laws saying that platforms are immunized from liability for user content unless they know about the content, or exercise too much control over it. We don’t know exactly what constitutes too much “control,” but in a 2010 case, the Court said that ads on Google’s search results were immunized, even though they were algorithmically ranked.

The general result of the EU’s rules has been a “notice and takedown” system, kind of like what the U.S. has for copyright, in which platforms remove allegedly unlawful content if they are notified about it. The EU just overhauled that system, in the new Digital Services Act, in part to make it harder for accusers to get platforms to take content down. They were concerned about the well-documented problems with platforms honoring even bad-faith accusations, in order to avoid legal risks to themselves. It is ironic that the EU is moving toward this more speech-protective regime for platform liability, while lawmakers in the US want to do the opposite, adopting rules like the ones the EU just abandoned.

Under EU law, platforms that were told about individual posts containing identifiable, unlawful terrorist content would clearly have to take them down — which as far as we know is what these platforms did. But platforms would not be liable on the theory plaintiffs advanced in Taamneh and Gonzalez, which is that platforms had a duty to go out and actively search for other content to remove. The EU’s highest court has repeatedly said that obligations of this sort must be carefully limited, because they threaten Internet users’ free expression and privacy rights. EU lawmakers rejected such active monitoring obligations for terrorist content, in part because of major human rights and free expression objections raised by UN officials, <civil society groups, and others. In other words, the plaintiffs in Gonzalez and Taamneh advanced a theory that raises major free expression concerns under European standards, and should give us even greater pause under the First Amendment. Fortunately, the Court’s ruling saves those constitutional questions for another day.

Daphne Keller is a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School and director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. Her work focuses on platform regulation and Internet users’ rights. She has published both academically and in popular press; testified and participated in legislative processes; and taught and lectured extensively. Her recent work focuses on legal protections for users’ free expression rights when state and private power intersect, particularly through platforms’ enforcement of Terms of Service or use of algorithmic ranking and recommendations. Until 2015 Daphne was Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had primary responsibility for the company’s search products. She worked on groundbreaking Intermediary Liability litigation and legislation around the world and counseled both overall product development and individual content takedown decisions.

  from Legal Aggregate – Stanford Law School https://law.stanford.edu/2023/05/19/stanfords-daphne-keller-on-scotus-decision-that-google-twitter-and-facebook-not-responsible-for-islamic-state-deadly-posts/

source https://bobnitido.wordpress.com/2023/05/20/stanfords-daphne-keller-on-scotus-decision-that-google-twitter-and-facebook-not-responsible-for-islamic-state-deadly-posts/

[aaronjhill]

The Supreme Court unanimously protects right to free speech on online platforms in two key rulings

In Twitter v. Taamneh: The Court ruled that when companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook simply provide a platform that's open to anyone for speech purposes, that isn't enough to "aid and abet" an act of terrorism under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

In Gonzalez v. Google: SCOTUS sent the case back to the court of appeals, leaving in place the vital protections for free speech afforded by Section 230. Under Section 230, platforms generally won't be held liable for user-posted content, removing incentives to limit what we say online.

[lutoogyan]

SCOTUS Rules in Favor of Google and Twitter in Terrorism Cases

Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images) The Supreme Court dodged a legal landmine Thursday by saying it didn’t need to reinterpret Big Tech’s most crucial legal liability shield, ruling in favor of Google and Twitter in a pair of terrorism lawsuits lodged against them. The court’s decision means Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act— a 1996 provision that prevents platforms from being…

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[noisynutcrusade]

Media Insider: SCOTUS Hears Section 230 Cases, Lemon Returns to CNN, Psaki to Anchor at MSNBC

Welcome to Media Insider, PR Newswire’s roundup of media news stories from the week. This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, cases that could shape the future of the internet if they lead to a reinterpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230, created in the 1990s, provides a legal shield to tech companies,…

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[parttimereporter]

It is going to be a busy and controversial (of course) Supreme Court season ..

Just a smattering of what the Supreme Court has in store for America in 2023:

Biden administration lawyer will try before the high court’s justices  to fend off challenges to block its plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for qualifying borrowers.

Rulings in the cases are expected by the summer.

The Supreme Court on the first day of the session is set to hear Gonzalez v. Google, which could end protections internet companies have had from Section 230, part of the federal code enacted as part of the 1996 Communications Decency. (this is a huge case with big ramifications!)

The plaintiffs in the case are relatives a person killed in Islamic State terror terrorists in Paris in November 2015. They argue Google aided and abetted terrorism by purportedly recommending pro-ISIS content to users on YouTube. Google argues that its recommendations are protected by Section 230.

ALL DEVELOPING IN THIS SCOTUS SEASON..

#scotus #supreme court #school loans #politics #legal

[tamarovjo4]

A preview of the Gonzalez v. Google case and a look at the Israeli nonprofit law center Shurat HaDin arguing against YouTube at the February 21 SCOTUS hearing (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)

http://dlvr.it/SjhGhn

[newsdeshya-2022]

SCOTUS to hear challenge to Section 230 protections - POLITICO - POLITICO

SCOTUS to hear challenge to Section 230 protections – POLITICO – POLITICO

Technology Clarence Thomas has been alluding in previous dissents on other court cases that it is time for the Supreme Court to decide whether Section 230 provides tech companies overly broad liability protections. The Supreme Court will decide in the case of Gonzalez v. Google LLC whether those protections are too far-reaching when it comes to Google’s recommendations of terrorist videos. | Anna…

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[187days]

Day One Hundred Seventeen

Today was a bit of a rollercoaster day: lots of ups, but also some downs.

In World, I taught the first of a series of lessons on Hinduism and Buddhism: students shared what they already knew about both religions, read an article about their origins and teachings, and then focused in specifically on Hinduism by watching a video about the day in the life of a Hindu priest. In APGOV, my students worked on their SCOTUS case projects, and I gave feedback as needed. Meantime, my independent study student, who does his work during that same block, had a Google Meet with the state rep he’s been working with, and then he and I had a chat about the work he’s done on education policy (research related specific bills, observing a public hearing in Concord, etc...). We also talked about the next thing he wants to focus on: funding for Fish and Game, and more specifically for search and rescue efforts (the aforementioned state rep is drafting a bill pertaining to this).

So it’s all really cool to teach. Even better: my students were engaged, their work was well done, and they asked some terrific questions. That’s definitely an up.

I also made some progress with a ninth grader who just returned from a week of OSS. I told him I was glad to see him when he arrived, and got him squared away for class, which I think made a world of difference to him. Maybe he was worried that he wouldn’t be welcomed back, or something along those lines, I’m not sure. I just know his attitude was really positive from then on out. When I asked him to come see me during a flex or another time so I could help him get caught up, he said he would, but, more importantly, he was smiling and said thank you. That might seem like no big deal, but, trust me, it’s a big deal. So that’s also an up.

The down? Another of my students was just given on OSS. And it’s not that I think that it’s an unfair punishment, or have deep philosophical objections to out-of-school suspensions; I just know it’ll be a struggle for him to recover academically (yes, students can access their work on Classroom and keep up that way while they’re not in school, but can doesn’t always mean will).

But there was another up outside of the regular school day. Most of my GOV students, and my independent study student, came to observe the local deliberative session this evening. I was obviously there as a member of the voting public, but I was also teaching through it, explaining the debate procedures and answering questions. The closure of one of the elementary schools was being discussed, at one point, and it got a little heated, but people were generally polite and respectful. A lot folks told me they were happy to see my students there, which was great. 

The other down? It’s way past my bedtime now! Heh.

#teaching #teacher #teachblr #edublr #educhums #education #high school #social studies #deliberative session #politics and education #independent study #day one hundred seventeen

[graymanbriefing]

1st Amendment Brief: Social Media BLUF: SCOTUS to rule on censorship covert bias related social media practices. The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has agreed to rule on Gonzalez v. Google which could decide if social media outlets (SMOs) and their algorithms that "serve" content to consumers are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A U.S. Court of Appeals has already ruled that SMOs are protected under the act but a dissenting Judge disagreed. SCOTUS will also rule on Twitter v. Taamneh, No. 21-1496 which will decide if Twitter, Facebook and Google can face civil suits for claims that they abetted terrorism by allowing terrorists to use their outlets. Free speech implications and censorship opportunities exist. Rulings would effect SMO policy, legal challenges, and algorithm design. Debrief: These cases could have monumental outcomes dependant upon the ruling. In a free country that allows open communication and thought, a ruling that holds SMOs overly responsible for the content shared by their users could lead to increased censorship on the platform. Alternatively, unchecked hostile algorithms used to influence behavior and outcomes of real-world events will further undermine elections and public opinion. An opinionated, and open for argument, analysis of the best outcome would be one that allows all non-criminal speech to be uncensored while all 3rd party and user content would be "served" chronologically to only users who have followed/subscribed to that content provider. This wou...(CLASSIFIED, get full brief at www.graymanbriefing.com)

#News #Intel #Situational Awareness #Prepping

[bobnitido]

Four questions: Evelyn Douek on what Section 230 is and why it is misunderstood

Evelyn Douek, Assistant Professor of Law

(Originally published by Stanford News on October 7, 2022)

On the docket for the United States Supreme Court this term is Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, high-profile cases that may redefine Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, legislation that protects platforms from what their users say on their websites, and platform liability for hosting terrorist material.

Through the protections to free speech that Section 230 provides, movements like #MeToo have flourished, said Stanford Law School Professor Evelyn Douek whose scholarship examines the private and public regulation of online speech. Without Section 230, platforms may be more risk-averse in what content they allow on their platforms, she said in an interview with Stanford News.

Here, Douek talks about what Section 230 is and why it is important for freedom of speech.

What is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and what makes it so controversial?

Section 230 has two important parts. First, it immunizes internet platforms from most forms of liability for the content that other users post on their sites. So if I defame you in a tweet, you can sue me, but not Twitter. This is perhaps the most well-known part of Section 230. But the law also has another part to it which immunizes platforms from liability for the content moderation decisions they make – that is, platforms can take down content and you can’t sue them for that either. The law is controversial because in a time of growing anger and discontent about platforms’ content moderation – from both sides of politics – Section 230 has become a general stand-in for “something that shields platforms from liability, which is bad because I want platforms to face more liability for all the bad stuff they do in the world.”

What do people – including pundits and politicians – misunderstand about Section 230?

The main goal of Section 230 is not to protect platforms, but to protect speech. In a world without Section 230, platforms that now face potential liability for content on their sites will be far more risk-averse and take a lot more content down to avoid the possibility of facing a lawsuit. The #MeToo movement, for example, might have played out very differently in a world where platforms took down any posts that even remotely looked defamatory. It’s also important to understand that much of the speech that people are worried about – hate speech, or political and medical misinformation, for example – is protected speech under the First Amendment. That’s why platforms don’t face liability, not because of Section 230. Get rid of section 230 tomorrow, and you still won’t be able to sue YouTube in the U.S. for hosting hate speech.

How could SCOTUS transform social media moderation and online publishing?

The main question SCOTUS is now going to consider is whether platforms are still immunized by Section 230 if they recommend certain content to users. Specifically, the plaintiffs want to sue YouTube for allegedly recommending ISIS content to users, and they argue that YouTube shouldn’t be immunized by Section 230 for its own recommendations. The thing is recommendation algorithms are a central part of the internet as we know it. When you type a search query into Google, the responses it serves up are those algorithmically recommended to you. Your Facebook newsfeed and Twitter feed are the result of algorithmic recommendations. If the court decides recommendation algorithms fall outside the scope of Section 230, and it takes a broad view of what constitutes a recommendation algorithm, many of these platforms may change the way they operate and become far more risk averse in the content they host. Before you celebrate, remember that it is often marginalized users and communities, or important forms of controversial speech, that such crackdowns will hit the hardest.

Anything else you would like to add?

This is going to be a blockbuster year for decisions about platform liability and regulation. There is also ongoing litigation around two social media laws from Texas and Florida that are widely predicted to end up at the Supreme Court imminently too (for a good primer on those, here’s a handy podcast I prepared earlier). Depending on what happens – and it’s really anyone’s guess – your internet could look pretty different in a few years.

from Legal Aggregate – Stanford Law School https://law.stanford.edu/2023/02/23/four-questions-evelyn-douek-on-what-section-230-is-and-why-it-is-misunderstood/

source https://bobnitido.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/four-questions-evelyn-douek-on-what-section-230-is-and-why-it-is-misunderstood/

[mercurymusing]

Slowly chewing my way through a copy of The Digital Closet I picked up in May.

Chapter 3 mentions how Google used to have "bisexual" flagged as a porn term, and thus hid or deprioritized results while filtering it from autocomplete.

Reference from Ch. 3, Note 50-

Note that the deprioritization- on any site that just had the keyword "bisexual"- was apparently identified in 2009. From some other quick searches, it looks like they didn't fix the autocomplete issue until a partial punch out in 2014.

I started to mentally compose something about how I'd missed or forgotten this, but then I actually started reading articles from 2012.

Amazing how much and how little has changed in a decade. I was there, but somehow more recent nonsensical bi discourse has obscured what it was really like. Wildly frustrating to skim through mainstream news articles and realize how much of this we're still toting around and endlessly bickering over. How much of it I've seen here and elsewhere in the last month, even!

Mostly it's been out-and-out assholes (man residue!) and cluless q-slur-hyper-puritan tiktok teens (panphobes!), but I've seen some shockingly regressive takes in the midst of the post-Dobbs SCOTUS panic over Obergefell and Lawrence and other rulings.

Pride discourse and flag bickering and arguments over cartoons are always frustrating, but they come from a place of immense privilege. Lawrence was before I knew enough to pay attention, but I remember just how vicious the respectability politics got when marriage was an active fight. How much fear, when the primary question was existence and not acceptance or visibility.

It's tempting to place all the blame on the first letters, when they start trying to chip the extras off the end. "The As just want to be special", "Q? Like the slur?", "Ts? Why even have the gender stuff? It's about sexuality. (What do you mean I? Never heard of 'em)", "Bs? They're either faking for attention or tainted."

It's a trap. There's no amount of cutting away of the fringes or cramming into the box of normality that will appease the haters. There's no hierarchy of oppression that can be won or lost. Turning on each other, letting fear pry open cracks, is doing the other side's work for them.

I don't mean to minimize everything that's happened in the interim. One court case didn't magically fix everything. But as the march towards acceptance brought integration and normality closer, the deeper fears have been forgotten. There are kids and full-blown adults today who never worried about the law turning against them, who can look at a month of rainbow capitalism and feel scorn for being courted.

The fears are resurfacing. The hate and bigotry never went away, and their acolytes have toiled for a resurgence that is coming to fruition. Suddenly acceptance is slipping away. Existence is under threat, and visibility is only a positive if it's the right visibility. If the problematic elements are sacrificed, excised, or silenced, surely it will be enough?

It will not. Unity and coalition building are the only way to avoid defeat in detail. Exclusion and hate are the enemy, and they can not be defeated with their own tools.

#The Digital Closet #queer reading #lgbtq #bisexual #scotus #accidental essays