Private Catholic school in the 70's and early 80's. Remember ice age, nuclear war, ozone layer. I graduated HS in 83, don't remember hearing about much about AIDS til later. But I was a news nerd from an early age so not sure if I read it at home or heard all of that at school. I wrote a term paper in HS about how budget deficits were go…
Private Catholic school in the 70's and early 80's. Remember ice age, nuclear war, ozone layer. I graduated HS in 83, don't remember hearing about much about AIDS til later. But I was a news nerd from an early age so not sure if I read it at home or heard all of that at school. I wrote a term paper in HS about how budget deficits were going to ruin this country. Still believe it. Just taken longer than I thought it would.
This essay says it better than I can (from Jan 2021)
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the First Amendment protects only against government censorship. That view is wrong: Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is "axiomatic," the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government "may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." That's what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.
Private Catholic school in the 70's and early 80's. Remember ice age, nuclear war, ozone layer. I graduated HS in 83, don't remember hearing about much about AIDS til later. But I was a news nerd from an early age so not sure if I read it at home or heard all of that at school. I wrote a term paper in HS about how budget deficits were going to ruin this country. Still believe it. Just taken longer than I thought it would.
This essay says it better than I can (from Jan 2021)
Save the Constitution From Big Tech
Credit: By Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld
https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-constitution-from-big-tech-11610387105
(excerpt)
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the First Amendment protects only against government censorship. That view is wrong: Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is "axiomatic," the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government "may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." That's what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.