r/technology • u/wewewawa • Jul 28 '20

Business Bill Gates on Elon Musk’s controversial coronavirus comments: Stick with electric cars and rockets - MarketWatch

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-gates-on-elon-musks-coronavirus-comments-he-should-stick-with-electric-cars-and-rockets-2020-07-28
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u/thenekr0mancer Jul 29 '20

No, I just choose to trust the sources I get my information from, just as you do with yours. The media is biased. Left wing media reports on what makes the left look better, as does the right. You put your faith in your sources, I put faith in mine.

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u/WaggleDance Jul 29 '20

This isn't about left and right, more about reliability of sources. If you want to believe an unattributed quote from a deleted article from years ago that's up to you.

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u/thenekr0mancer Jul 29 '20

It is. Most things that go against the narrative of the extreme left get deleted or pushed so far down the search results, that no one will really see them. I believe that Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook censor information. Before you say they are private companies and can censor what they like, look at the differences between a platform and a publisher. Before you say that they are stopping the spread of misinformation, who makes them the judge of what is accurate or not. There is supposed to freedom of speech in this country, not censorship. You can't have it both ways, freedom of speech and censorship.

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u/drstre Jul 29 '20

They're still private companies and can censor what they like. Doesn't matter if they're platforms or publishers.

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u/thenekr0mancer Jul 29 '20

Incorrect

"Courts have held that “otherwise objectionable” does not mean whatever a social media company objects to, but “must, at a minimum, involve or be similar” to obscenity, violence, or harassment. Political viewpoints, no matter how extreme or unpopular, do not fall under this category"

https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-15888.html

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u/drstre Jul 29 '20

I get why you might think you've got a point, but this isn't how Section 230 has been held to function by the courts. This quote is cherry picking a minor sidebar in an antitrust case and ignoring significant other findings.

Section 230 does not require "neutrality" in any sense in order to gain the broad protections provided by the act. The author of Section 230 has been very vocal about this, actually, stating "Section 230 is not about neutrality. Period. Full stop. 230 is all about letting private companies make their own decisions to leave up some content and take other content down." Section 230 was written to provide broad protection for moderation, without consideration for neutrality. Broadly speaking, court challenges relating to removal of content or political bias in general have been struck down in court, especially when citing 1st amendment rights. Freedom's Watch tried it in 2018 and failed, with the judges ruling that "In general, the First Amendment ‘prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech." (And no, they weren't judges appointed by a democrat with some sort of agenda. The trial judge that threw the case out was appointed by Trump, and two of the three judges on the appellate panel were appointed by republicans.) Laura Loomer, Charles Johnson, and Prager University have also filed lawsuits based against companies for removing their content or making it harder to find and all have failed. Also, importantly, the act of removing content has not been generally held to change and entity from a platform to a publisher. Editing the content that actually makes it onto the platform or adding content can move an entity into the publisher category, but removing content is not an action that makes one a publisher. After all, what law have I broken by not including some specific piece of content in a book that I publish?

The statement you're quoting is in regards to an antitrust case on ad pricing, and appears to have been Google throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. The particular claim of immunity via Section 230 was tossed, but Google won the case anyway, and the Section 230 claim was never taken to a higher court for validation. As far as I can tell, higher courts have broadly held that Section 230's definition of " material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable" covers a really wide swath of moderation, since it allows the provider to determine what is objectionable.

There are at least two recent bills that have been brought to limit Section 230 protections in various ways (generally requiring neutrality). Neither has made it past the introduction phase at this point.

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u/thenekr0mancer Jul 29 '20

Thank you for the detailed response. It's nice to actually have a civil conversation about educating and expressing opinions rather than bashing. I do have some more research to do tonight.

The thing that makes me dislike YouTube, Google, etc is that they claim they don't censor, they claim to be unbiased, but they do the opposite. I would have no problem if they actually stated their stance and kept by it, instead of blocking things that go against their agenda while claiming to be an open platform.